


Déjà Vécu

by lucyoppa



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon Universe, Death, Depression, Discrimination, Drunk Sex, Homophobia, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Murder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prostitution, Racism, Reincarnation, Substance Abuse, Suicide, TopSoo, Underage Sex, Violence, non-au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 12:03:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11714034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucyoppa/pseuds/lucyoppa
Summary: "I think it's something you may have forgotten, my love. I suspect you'll remember in time."





	1. part i

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** This story includes darker, possibly triggering themes, and various forms of morally objectionable behaviour, such as murder, extreme discrimination, and infidelity (etc.). Choosing to include such content was done for the sake of realism in the plotline, and not because I, the author, would ever personally condone such behaviour, or take themes such as suicide and mental illness (etc.) lightly. It should also be made clear that this story is completely fictional, and is not based on, or meant to resemble any real-life events in any way other than a surface-level, fictional re-interpretation. Should any of the story suggest that I have a personal dislike for, or bias against any of the characters or pairings included, I would also like to make it clear that this does not translate into my feelings about the real-life people on which said characters and pairings are based.
> 
> Hello, this is a cross-post from [AFF](http://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/1220259/d--j---v--cu-angst-jongin-kyungsoo-kaisoo-nonau-topsoo-reincarnationau), but it was originally uploaded over on [livejournal](http://topkyungsoo.livejournal.com/11021.html) as my submission for [top!soofest](http://topkyungsoo.livejournal.com/) (here's their [twitter](https://twitter.com/soo_tops)/[tumblr](http://topkyungsoo.tumblr.com/)). This was voted for as the 'Best Fic' during the awards section of the fest - and I'm still extremely grateful to anyone who took the time to read, comment, or vote for it during the fest. Thank you so much!! And to any of you coming across it for the first time now, I hope you enjoy <3
> 
> As always, if you wanna chat come follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/lucy_oppa), or drop a message in my [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/lucyoppa) if you're shy!

 

 

In this life, Kyungsoo is abandoned soon after birth.   
  
The woman that finds him is shaken and sympathetic, but moves behind the screen of polite disinterest once she palms him off on the nearest orphanage. There, he is christened Moon Byungho, and after six months of little success in finding his real parents, they give up and try to have him adopted. But he’s only one child in many – another mouth to feed without a home, without anyone to love him – and in the end, he is not the one that any of the very few hopeful parents-to-be choose to bring home with them.  
  
Throughout his childhood, he drifts.  
  
Foster home fades into foster home, childhood morphs into adolescence, and by the morning of his eighteenth birthday, he has racked up ten different families who do not love him, very few of whom he remembers, and none of which he bothers to stay in contact with.  
  
The first thing he does with his newly acquired freedom is enlist in the army. With news of the war almost everywhere he looks, and nothing he particularly wants to do with himself, he decides there’s no better person to sign up to become canon fodder than someone like him.  
  
Why would there be, when he has no family? When he has no one to miss him while he’s away, and no one to yearn for back home himself?  
  
They throw eighteen year olds like him – those few young and stupid enough to enlist before they’re forced – out to the front lines with as little training as they can swing without a full-blown public outcry. There’s a mentality amongst the higher ups that the younger they are, the stupider, and therefore more aggressive. Kyungsoo probably doesn’t fit the description, but he does meet their criteria, so after his initial boot camp and training, him and his squad are sent out to the trenches.  
  
He gets lucky enough to join at a quieter point in the front-line conflict, and though they have to duck for cover and fire some shots every now and again, it’s almost easy to convince himself that he isn’t in the middle of a deadly battle, that this isn’t life or death, and that he might even be  _safe_  here, amidst his comrades.  
  
And the main reason for his strangely misplaced feelings is the fact that for the first time, Kyungsoo actually feels some kind of camaraderie with his fellow soldiers in the trenches. Being stuck together 24/7 makes a group of people bond relatively quickly, and listening to the others tell stories, about their lives back home, about earlier battles in previous wars, makes Kyungsoo feel included and wanted.  
  
For the first time in his life, Kyungsoo thinks he might understand what ‘friends’ are.  
  
But Kyungsoo’s life – like the war – is unpredictable, and all of a sudden, it is reduced to nothing but the whistle of bullets too close to his head, to the sight of bodies dropping, lifeless, to the floor. Men he would have once called brothers fall, limp, beside him, but he cannot stop and grieve.  
  
To stop, even for a moment, means to commit one’s self to the rising body count, and Kyungsoo doesn’t really want to die.  
  
He runs, but in the confusion and terror and uproar, the man in front of him is hit, and the body ends up sprawled on top of him, sticky redness gushing over Kyungsoo’s skin from the wound in his chest. The man claws – at the earth, at Kyungsoo’s face – and begs to be held, to be saved, to be shot.  
  
Anything to end the pain.  
  
But Kyungsoo cannot do that. Kyungsoo must run.  
  
He tries to push the man off even as he claws harder, grips onto Kyungsoo’s arms with the kind of strength a dying man should not possess. In a split second, Kyungsoo recognises him. His name is Youngchul, but Kyungsoo can’t remember his family name, or even if he was ever told.  
  
But does it matter when Youngchul is so obviously dying? Does the fact that they laughed and existed and breathed together even count when Kyungsoo needs to run to save his own life, has no time to watch Youngchul’s eyes roll back into his head, a strange froth forming at the corners of his mouth.  
  
He tries again to push him off, but he is heavy.  
  
And  _‘Youngchul is heavy’_  ends up being his last thought for a very long time.  
  
Because the next blast is from something much deadlier than a gun, and Youngchul’s weight on top of him is the only reason it takes half of his right leg instead of his life.  
  
When he wakes up, it’s to bright lights, and nurses’ smiles as sterile as the bed in which he lies. The dates on all the newspapers tell him he’s twenty instead of nineteen, that more time has passed than he feels.  
  
Those same newspapers also tell him that the war is over, that now, he needs a new plan, and he doesn’t have one.  
  
It takes months before they shift him from the intensive care unit to another wing of the hospital, and a further week until they discharge him completely. When he leaves, there is no family waiting to welcome him home with quiet arms, and it’s Kyungsoo alone in a dusty taxi cab, taking him to the tiny hanok one of the nurses was kind enough to help him organise.  
  
His hanok is far from wheelchair friendly, though he was lucky enough to get one with a modern, indoor bathroom to cater for his disability. Getting down onto the floor for his first sleepless night in his new home is nigh-impossible, but not quite as hard as getting himself back  _up_  and into his wheelchair again the next morning.  
  
He’s never struggled with such simple tasks like this before, and Kyungsoo finds himself feeling completely hopeless.  
  
At twenty years old, he is a war veteran. He’s disabled, penniless, and with no friends or known living relatives, he’s utterly, utterly alone.  
  
Most people would find his life depressing. But Kyungsoo just feels numb. Just like he always has.  
  
Then rehabilitation starts.  
  
“It’ll take years, probably,” the doctor in the white coat with the pleasant smile tells him. Kyungsoo’s learnt by now not to remember names, when nine out of ten times, people forget him. The only difference is that now,  _he’s_  the one doing the forgetting, and this polite doctor isn’t really an exception.  
  
They’re going to give him a prosthetic leg. And then they’re going to get him walking without the wheelchair.  
  
At least that’s the plan.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t know how to tell the doctor that it doesn’t matter. That even if he  _could_  walk, he has no where to go, and there are probably more deserving people for the treatment.  
  
But then the whole thing is experimental, and Kyungsoo’s the one who’s been chosen as a test patient, so it’s not like he has to pay for anything himself. Besides, it’s the first time he’s seen another human being in three whole days, and in between listening to news about the aftermath of the war on his radio and staring at the wall, there’s an intangible itch that’s worked it’s way under his skin that only sunlight seems to cure.  
  
As part of his treatment, the doctor also insists that he sign up for the hospital’s own veteran support group. It’s a weekday session, so most of the men in attendance fought in wars previous to Kyungsoo’s own. Men his own age have jobs and lives and families to get back to now that everything is being rebuilt, and Kyungsoo’s been left in the dust.  
  
But the age gap doesn’t exactly help make him any more approachable.  
  
Nor does the fact that he doesn’t speak a word to anyone for the whole meeting. He’s never really been great with the whole socialisation thing.  
  
But the problem is that they’re supposed to find a ‘buddy’. Someone they can meet up with between group sessions and bond with, help each other out, and share the burden of war between them.  
  
But Kyungsoo wouldn’t know how to make a friend if he tried.  
  
When it’s clear that he hasn’t communicated with anyone, and the organisers of the support group take into account the age gap, they decide they’ll find someone different for him. So instead of another veteran, they snag one of the hospital’s psychiatry residents into the deal, with the excuse that working so closely with a war veteran will look great on his resume, and put some of the skills he needs to the test.  
  
And so, the Kyungsoo in this life – Moon Byungho – meets Bae Jongyul in the sterile light of a hospital corridor, and despite the harsh white of everything around them, the other man still manages to look soft and warm in a way Kyungsoo isn’t used to.  
  
He’s tall, and the height difference is further pronounced by Kyungsoo’s wheelchair. Despite this, Jongyul manages to talk to him without talking  _down_  to him, and insists on wheeling Kyungsoo outside into the sunshine to speak, where he can sit on a bench away from the sound of heart monitors and hushed voices to chat.  
  
“We should arrange a meeting,” Jongyul suggests once Kyungsoo has given him his address and telephone number. The other man scrubs his hands over his eyes and grimaces – and for once in his life, Kyungsoo finds another’s mannerisms strangely intriguing, for reasons he doesn’t quite understand.  
  
Jongyul is busy at the hospital all week, but free on weekends. Kyungsoo is free always, but he humours Jongyul’s many different suggestions of when they should meet up. In the end, they decide on the coming Saturday, and when Jongyul leans over to jot that down in the day planner spread open over his thighs, Kyungsoo gets a flash of a sharp jawline, a whiff of hospital anti-septic when he moves like that.  
  
And it’s strange.  
  
Because it’s not normal for him to  _notice_  people like this.  
  
By the time he leaves, Jongyul hasn’t asked him any questions, hasn’t spoken unnecessarily to him more than an offhanded comment about the weather. And it might just be because of the dark circles under his eyes, the way his body sags so tiredly into the bench, but it makes the bubble of anxiety in Kyungsoo’s stomach settle to nothing more than a faint simmer, set itself on a back burner for  _later_.  
  
When he falls asleep that night, his head is filled with tanned skin and sleepy eyes.   
  
And despite his bad habits, he just can’t forget Jongyul’s name.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**_Busan, South Korea, 1955_**  
  
  
  
Saturday morning smacks Kyungsoo into consciousness with the ringing of his telephone.  
  
It’s loud – near ear-splitting in the simple quiet of his hanok – and he isn’t used to it. The only calls he’s really gotten up until now have been the hospital to contact him about his various appointments and prescriptions, but they’ve never called so early, and he’s always been awake.  
  
And alert.   
  
But then he’s  _always_  alert when he’s awake.  
  
So Kyungsoo’s not used to being caught off guard by something like this, and he ends up starting his day with a near-heart attack. When he realises what it is (and  _where_  he is), he drags his body up and into his wheelchair, and wheels himself through the house to claw the phone off the receiver, gasping a rather breathless “hello?” into the mouthpiece.  
  
He doesn’t care if the person on the other end can sense his distress. He just wants the noise to stop.  
  
He just wants to stop hearing gunshots every time a car exhaust chokes, and men screaming every time a baby cries. He doesn’t want to hear people choking on their own blood every time someone coughs too close to him anymore.  
  
“Byungho?” The man on the other end of the line sounds unsure. “Is that you? It’s me, Jongyul.”  
  
Kyungsoo has to take a deep breath before he speaks, attempts to calm his rapid pulse with the knowledge that he is, in fact, safe.  
  
“Yes. It’s me.”  
  
“I was just calling to confirm that we’re still on for lunch?” Jongyul asks, and he doesn’t seem to have noticed Kyungsoo’s freak-out, because his tone is friendly and warm again, but less tired than it was that day at the hospital. “Do you know the address?”  
  
Kyungsoo responds with short, one-word answers, and the call ends rather quickly. He spends twice as long as he normally does in the shower afterwards, trying to wash the horrible crawl off of his skin from earlier.  
  
He’d thought – for at least a second there – that he was back. Back on the battlefield, surrounded by bullets, and grenades, and  _death_.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t want to go back.  
  
It takes him a while to get ready. Maybe because he’s not used to going out and seeing people. Maybe he has to remind himself to wear something a little nicer than usual. Maybe the apprehension rolling through his stomach in waves is back now at full force, and maybe he kind of just doesn’t know whether he wants to meet up with Jongyul at all.  
  
Or  _talk_  to Jongyul, for that matter.  
  
Because Jongyul’s a psychiatrist-in-training, and Kyungsoo’s not fool enough to believe he doesn’t have anything wrong with him after being abandoned as a baby, having a generally unhappy childhood, and losing his leg in the war.   
  
And Jongyul might want to discuss all of those things, in time, but Kyungsoo’s not very good at talking, even about the most mundane of topics.  
  
Let alone the things that keep him up at night.  
  
Nevertheless, he finds himself pushing open the door of a warm, hole-in-the-wall kind of place not more than five minutes after their arranged meeting time. A little late, but not impolite.  
  
His wheelchair catches on the threshold, and Kyungsoo doesn’t have enough hands to hold the door open and simultaneously get the wheels unstuck. It seems Jongyul has spotted his arrival though, because a moment later, there are graceful hands helping him over and in, a voice he’s come to recognise now greeting him cheerfully.  
  
The restaurant is noisy, and Kyungsoo tries to stop himself from visibly flinching when a nearby customer drops their chopsticks with a loud clatter. The noises from the kitchen – shouting, banging, chopping – don’t help much either.  
  
But if Jongyul notices his agitation, he doesn’t say anything, voice smooth when he orders, and hands clasped pleasantly – if a little nervously – on the table in front of him. Kyungsoo gets the feeling he’s shy.  
  
Which is just  _great_ , since Kyungsoo’s not one to keep a conversation going either.  
  
“So…” Jongyul starts, and Kyungsoo can see him mentally navigating his way through a minefield of topics that could possibly offend him. “Um. What do you do? As a job, I mean?”  
  
“I don’t,” Kyungsoo replies, trying not to wince when someone in the kitchen starts yelling again. He doesn’t know how he’s going to make it through a whole meal here.  
  
“Oh,” Jongyul says. And honestly, what else  _can_  he say, when Kyungsoo isn’t leaving any room for the conversation to develop. He decides to give it another half-try, to stop Jongyul from looking so painfully awkward, if nothing else.  
  
“I live off my veteran grant.” He continues. Then he tries a smile that he hopes isn’t as disjointed as it feels, and lies through his teeth. “I’m still kind of trying to get my life back together.”  
  
Kyungsoo isn’t doing anything of the sort. If he’s honest, Kyungsoo doesn’t think his life was  _ever_  together in the first place.  
  
But it seems his answer is a good one, because Jongyul smiles at that, eyes crinkling up into little crescents, the fullness of his lips stretching thin when he does so.  
  
“Oh, well…” Jongyul reaches up to scratch behind one of his ears, and the smile turns shy. “Maybe I could help you out with that? Since I’m your assigned buddy, and all.”  
  
Jongyul should not help him out with that.  
  
Jongyul should not inject himself into Kyungsoo’s personal life any more than he strictly has to.  
  
But Kyungsoo nods anyway, because Jongyul’s expectant smile is something he doesn’t really want to crush. Not right now, not so early into their relationship, and probably not ever.  
  
Which, again, is weird. Because since when does he care?  
  
The meal continues as pleasantly as it could with Kyungsoo still flinching every five minutes. By the end of it though, he’s managed to focus slightly less on the noise, and a little more on the way Jongyul moves his hands when he speaks, with rapid little gestures that are unquestionably endearing.   
  
It’s almost easy to forget that the other is a full seven years older than him, with the way he keeps pulling the sleeves of his shirt down and over his hands.  
  
Jongyul does most of the speaking, and Kyungsoo doesn’t really mind that he only has to interject to answer the other man’s occasional question. There’s not much to know about Kyungsoo though, and in the end, the only thing he’s really told him is about his prosthetic, about how the surgery is scheduled for two weeks from then.  
  
He also learns a lot about Jongyul. About how his family lived abroad during the war, and were therefore safe. About how he wasn’t drafted because of his medical degree, and how his entire family decided to return afterwards, because his father is also a doctor, and he felt he could help out here more than anywhere else. He learns that Jongyul has a sister, younger than him, and that his eyes light up when he talks about her, as if his family means the world to him.  
  
Kyungsoo wouldn’t know how that feels.  
  
He also learns that Jongyul has this innocence about him. He’s untainted by so much of what’s happened in this country, and there’s something so genuine about his entire demeanour that Kyungsoo finds himself thoroughly charmed by the time their meal ends. Even when the other grows weary from talking about his long hours at the hospital – the recent influx of PTSD patients, and the short-staffing issues have even the residents working overtime – he doesn’t quite lose that spark in his eyes.  
  
Kyungsoo wonders when he lost his own spark. Kyungsoo wonders if he even  _had_  a spark to begin with.  
  
They agree to meet again next weekend before they go, and Kyungsoo realises that Jongyul isn’t as unobservant as he seems when he softly tells him: “we’ll meet somewhere quieter next time, yeah?” just as he helps get his wheelchair back out of the entrance door again.  
  
He also realises Jongyul is very kind.  
  
When he gets home, his hanok is, as usual, very quiet.  
  
For once, Kyungsoo finds the silence invasive rather than soothing.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
For their second meeting, Jongyul takes Byungho to the nearest park.  
  
And he’s kept his promise, it seems, because the park  _is_  much quieter than the restaurant. The only people here other than them – a couple of families with young children – are quite far away, seeing as Kyungsoo couldn’t make it very far off of the main path. As soon as Jongyul had tried to venture off of it, Kyungsoo’s wheelchair had gotten all stuck up with clods of glass and soil, and he’d given up, spreading a blanket for him to sit on near the edge and dusting the muck off of Kyungsoo’s wheels for him.  
  
It’s pleasant. A little sunny, seeing as the only trees around are young and recently replanted after the war – too scraggly to provide any shade yet. But it’s nice to feel the warmth on his skin like this, Kyungsoo thinks, and besides, there’s enough of a breeze that he isn’t at all uncomfortable.  
  
Physically, that is. Mentally he kind of wants to die when Jongyul turns to him and says: “I didn’t really get to know all that much about you last time.”  
  
Kyungsoo picks at his fingers and doesn’t look at Jongyul.  
  
“What do you want to know?”  
  
“Well…” Jongyul shifts to lie back on the blanket, arms folded behind the back of his head. If he notices Kyungsoo’s discomfort, he doesn’t say anything. “You don’t have a job, right? So what do you, you know, do? With all your time?”  
  
Kyungsoo lays his palms flat on his thighs to stop fidgeting so much.  
  
“I… read sometimes.”  
  
He doesn’t think it’s a good idea to tell a psychiatrist how easy it is for him to spend hours on end doing absolutely nothing, just staring off into space. Unless he wants undue concern into his life. This listlessness of his isn’t healthy, and he knows it.  
  
Jongyul’s looking at him now. Kyungsoo hasn’t turned his head but he can feel the weight of eyes on the side of his face. Curious. Invasive.  
  
“It’s hard to get out much. With my wheelchair,” Kyungsoo elaborates when the silence stretches, like that’s even vaguely an excuse he can use.  
  
Jongyul’s eyes are still on him, but this time Kyungsoo forces himself to turn and meet his gaze. His eyes are softer than Kyungsoo expected. Sympathetic.  
  
But not pitying. Not like the nurses used to look at him when they’d first showed him how to use his wheelchair and he had jolted himself right out, body crumpling on the cold white tiles and unable to help himself back up.  
  
It’s different.  
  
Kyungsoo isn’t sure how he feels about different.  
  
“Maybe the prosthetic will help with that,” Jongyul says, humming warmly in a way that suggests he doesn’t expect a reply. Moments later he’s changing the subject, and Kyungsoo is only somewhat glad, since this new topic is dangerous territory too. “What about your friends? Don’t they get you out sometimes?”  
  
Kyungsoo swallows. There’s no easy way to answer questions like these.  
  
“I don’t have any.”  
  
He tries for honesty, just to get it over with, if nothing else.  
  
“Hmm?” Jongyul hums like he didn’t hear him, and looks back at Kyungsoo from where he had been watching the children on the other side of the park kick a ball around.  
  
“I don’t have any friends.”  
  
Jongyul’s expression flattens out into something completely neutral. Kyungsoo can’t read him.  
  
He wonders if he’s being assessed. If Jongyul is sizing him up to the criteria for every mental illness in the handbook.  
  
He’d probably find a lot, but Kyungsoo doesn’t really want him to. Something about the idea of Jongyul writing him off as a basket case, and deciding his time is better spent with other, more sane people has his stomach tightening painfully.  
  
“I don’t know what happened to them after the war, I mean,” Kyungsoo looks down, again finding the need to explain himself. It’s exhausting, really, to talk this much, when his average number of words per day averages somewhere around three.  
  
(He’s too polite not to greet his neighbours when they see him. Otherwise it would be zero.)  
  
“I’m sorry,” Jongyul’s face morphs back into sympathy, but this time it’s a little more pronounced. “That was insensitive to ask. I wasn’t thinking.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s back to fiddling, hands wringing in his lap.   
  
“It’s ok.”  
  
“I’m almost scared to ask, since I keep messing up, but,” Jongyul smiles a little self-deprecatingly. “What about family? Do you see them often?”  
  
And this, at least, Kyungsoo knows he can say without his voice sounding tight. Because he hasn’t cared about his parents since he was very little, since the day he realised he could throw sand in the bullies eyes and make  _them_  cry instead.   
  
“I was abandoned as a baby. I was never adopted.”  
  
Jongyul’s face twists from his little joke to mild horror, seemingly so upset by Kyungsoo’s words that he finds it in himself to sit up and face him, the back of his hair a little mussed from how he was lying.  
  
“Byungho I’m so sorry – ”  
  
Jongyul’s obvious discomfort almost lets Kyungsoo forget about all of his own, which is nice.  
  
“It’s fine.” He looks back down at the other man and manages his second smile in what must be over a year. “I’m not sensitive about it.”  
  
Jongyul still looks a little shaken, but Kyungsoo’s obviously succeeded in his reassurance, because his next words are: “Maybe we should just talk about me now.”  
  
And for the first time in a long time, Kyungsoo actually manages to laugh.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The following week is his operation.  
  
They make him stay in the hospital overnight, and the next morning, they pump him full of sedatives, and put him right back to sleep. When he wakes up, there is a metal leg where there was once empty space and phantom pain, too heavy for him to lift with his disused muscles.  
  
He’s sleepy, still groping around and nearly fumbling his IV out when Jongyul pops his head around the corner and blinks at him.  
  
“The nurses told me you were awake,” he says, coming in when Kyungsoo blinks right back. “So I slipped away from work for a moment.”  
  
Later, Kyungsoo will realise that the strange feeling in his chest isn’t a side-effect of the anaesthetic after all.  
  
He’s never had this before. Even that time back in middle school when he fell out of a tree and broke his arm, he woke to nothing more than a nurse telling him that his foster parents would be round in an hour to pick him up.  
  
There was no one there when he woke up who actually  _cared_ , and had come by choice. There’s never really been anyone who’s cared, if he’s honest.  
  
“How are you feeling?”  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t think ‘vulnerable’ is the right answer, so he stays quiet.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
If Kyungsoo had known, before the operation, how much trouble it was going to be to learn to walk again, he probably would have refused the whole entire thing.  
  
For the first couple of days he has to stay in the hospital. There are nurses constantly buzzing in and out of his room, chattering away to him like he can half keep up with what they’re saying. His doctor comes by every now and again too, but it’s not like there’s any new information, so Kyungsoo doesn’t really know why when every time they just end up in a stilted and awkward conversation about how he’s feeling.  
  
And Jongyul, of course, drops by every time he can spare a minute. With the onslaught of strangers, Kyungsoo’s kind of glad to see someone who’s perfectly used to his silence, and doesn’t expect him to attempt any semblance of small talk.  
  
As a final step, he’s referred to a different doctor before he’s allowed to leave the hospital. This one is a physical therapist, with whom he will have several weekly appointments, and will be teaching him how to walk again.  
  
He sleeps deeply and dreamlessly the first night back in his hanok. The hospitals ambient noises – muffled beeping and the humming of machinery – had been too much for him when what he’d gotten used to before it had been peaceful and absolute silence.  
  
The next day is his first physical therapy session.  
  
And it’s disastrous.  
  
His new leg is heavy and he can’t lift it properly – his body having forgotten how muscles he hasn’t used properly for roughly a year work. Initially, he’d only half listened to the doctor’s careful instruction, because honestly, it was just  _walking_. He’d done it before.  
  
But after his third time crashing the floor, the feeling of purpling bruises blossoming under his skin starts to get to him, and he listens. Even though he really doesn’t want to take it that slow, doesn’t want to believe he’s so hopeless that he can’t walk in a straight line for three steps with a pair of cold metal bars to hold him up on either side.  
  
He used to be able to run for his life and fight for his country. How did he end up this…  _weak_?   
  
Jongyul is waiting for him outside the door when he gets out, worry etched into soft features.   
  
Kyungsoo wonders how the other can possibly care so genuinely for someone he’s known for such a short time, and more worryingly, how his own chest can tighten with affection at the boyish grin he receives when he tells him that therapy went “just fine.”  
  
It seems that Jongyul still wants to meet up on the weekends, despite the fact that Kyungsoo’s told him he doesn’t really have to. Because, to Jongyul, the group sessions are ‘important’ apparently, and he’d prefer it if Kyungsoo stuck to their routine.   
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t really agree, but he nods anyway, just to see Jongyul smile like that again. It makes his chest flutter curiously, a strange kind of affection he’s never felt before – even for the people he truly regarded as friends – bubbling up in his chest.  
  
In the end, he pins it down to the fact that Jongyul is different. Jongyul is just so very different to any of the friends he’s had in the past, the rough, unrefined kind of company Kyungsoo’s had the pleasure of keeping in his life.  
  
Jongyul is… sweet. Jongyul widens his eyes and pouts when he doesn’t understand things, and giggles somewhat ridiculously when Kyungsoo lets him have his way. He doesn’t shout or swear, break things or get worked up. He’s calm and soothing to be around – something Kyungsoo really needs.  
  
He’s also perfectly uncomplicated. He never presses Kyungsoo on the things he doesn’t want to talk about, which is somewhat surprising in regards to the whole psychiatrist thing, but wholly welcome to Kyungsoo.  
  
As time progresses, Kyungsoo becomes increasingly tired out from his therapy sessions by the end of each week, and they start meeting up at his house instead. He’s just too exhausted to drag himself out and do things, and Jongyul, as usual, is perfectly happy and understanding about adjusting their plans.   
  
(Jongyul tells him he  _would_  invite him round to his place, but he lives in a shared house with several other residents, and it’s usually very crowded and noisy. He doesn’t think Kyungsoo would appreciate it, and Kyungsoo silently agrees.)  
  
It becomes a routine for them. On weekends, they meet up and just spend time together. It’s not complicated, and Jongyul doesn’t expect him to talk much, often happy enough to just drink tea and listen to the radio with him, or do nothing and simply exist.  
  
Even so, Jongyul is still easy to talk to when they do find themselves conversing. He doesn’t ask hard questions, and can talk about nothing for what seems like forever. It’s light, easy and it keeps Kyungsoo perfectly entertained, to the point that he’s starting to miss Jongyul’s chatter when he leaves for the night.  
  
Kyungsoo once asked Jongyul if spending so much time with him wasn’t boring, but Jongyul had just laughed. He says for someone so busy during the week, taking some time out to just relax and do nothing on the weekend is exactly what he needs.  
  
Kyungsoo’s life continues on its suddenly very full course. He has his therapy sessions during the week to keep him busy, and looks forward to Jongyul’s visits on the coming weekends.  
  
What he doesn’t expect is for Jongyul to start working his way into Kyungsoo’s life in other ways. It starts with accompanying him to his therapy sessions every now and again. Helping Kyungsoo out when he struggles – catching him with an arm around his torso when he stumbles, or calming him with soothing words when the frustration and anger from not being able to do something so simple inevitably get to him.  
  
Jongyul visits more often, too. Even on weekdays, if he can get off of work early, he comes to see Kyungsoo, and they eat dinner together, quietly, in Kyungsoo’s house. Occasionally, Jongyul gets him to come out, too, introduces him to a couple of his friends and co-workers. But with the physical strain of walking to the pojangmacha Jongyul loves so much, and the high cost of public transport, they don’t do it that often.  
  
Kyungsoo finds he likes Jongyul. He likes Jongyul a lot.  
  
And with that comes the crippling fear that Jongyul is going to leave him, somehow and for some reason. Everyone he’s ever had any kind of connection to is no longer around, so why would someone new, someone he’s starting to think he cares more about than any of his previous friends, be any different?  
  
But when he gets afraid like that, Jongyul always seems to know. Maybe it’s from the way his grip on Jongyul’s shoulder will tighten infinitesimally, his breath quickening, but Jongyul will slide an arm around Kyungsoo just because – not because he needs it – or trail fingertips down to his palm to linger, just for a moment, before they’re gone.  
  
Jongyul is a very physically intimate kind of person. And oddly enough, Kyungsoo doesn’t mind.  
  
And Jongyul is a constant to him. Constant and calm and steady. He never gets angry even when Kyungsoo knows  _he_  would, never makes a fuss about all of the thinks that Kyungsoo just can’t seem to get right.  
  
If Jongyul has ever, even for a moment, grown weary of Kyungsoo’s presence, he’s never shown it. Kyungsoo’s confident he’s observant enough to know that for a fact.  
  
Slowly but surely, he grows comfortable with the idea that maybe, Jongyul won’t leave.  
  
It’s a nice feeling. Not one that he’s experienced much before.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s roughly a year after he meets Jongyul for the first time that a friend of his from the army manages to track him down (god knows how), and shows up at his front door.  
  
By now, he can walk by himself, albeit slowly, and with a lot of stumbling. Jongyul is still there to catch him as often as he can be, be it physically or mentally. He’s made the entire ordeal a lot more bearable than it technically should have been.  
  
“Hello?” he asks, opening the door in response to the firm knock he heard minutes earlier. A vaguely familiar face greets him when he peers out, though there’s a large scar covering half of it, and he can’t quite place the man.  
  
“Byungho?” he asks, and Kyungsoo nods, eyebrows furrowed even as he confirms the man’s question. “Moon Byungho?”  
  
Kyungsoo lets the door slide back so he can lean against the doorframe to support his weight and the semi-stranger glances down at his prosthetic leg. Something that looks a lot like realisation seems to dawn in his eyes.  
  
“It  _is_  you.”  
  
The other man is grinning now, but Kyungsoo’s still frowning.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Kyungsoo says, even as he shakes his head a little in confusion. “But who are you exactly?”  
  
The other’s grin merely widens.  
  
“It’s me, Sungki,” he says, stepping forward to punch Kyungsoo lightly on the arm, and causing him to flinch back a little in surprise. “Park Sungki? I can’t believe you don’t remember me.”  
  
Realisation dawns on Kyungsoo with a little gasp.  
  
“From squad nine?” he asks quickly, and Sungki nods. Kyungsoo’s smiling a bit himself now. “How could I forget?”  
  
Buried beneath the layer of horror and dust that was the war, there were always the good memories too. He remembers the laughter and late nights, of dirt crunching under his boots and that feeling of strange belonging.  
  
Sungki was undoubtedly a friend, back then.  
  
“Man you’ve had it worse than me,” he says now, glancing down over Kyungsoo’s prosthetic again. “I heard about what happened. With Youngchul and all. There were witnesses. I’m sorry.”  
  
Kyungsoo closes his eyes, swallowing back the inevitable flashbacks that surface on the backs of his eyelids, but they’re just words. It’s not like Sungki’s shouting or holding him down, and Kyungsoo can deal with it.  
  
They’re just words. A lot can change in a year, and Kyungsoo’s no exception.  
  
“I’m sorry too,” he says, gesturing, palm up, to Sungki’s face. “Neither of us got out unscathed, it seems.”  
  
Whatever Sungki says in reply gets lost in Kyungsoo’s distraction. Because suddenly there’s a touch at his elbow, and Jongyul’s there, peering curiously over his shoulder. For a moment, the gentle touch and the presence just behind him sap all of his attention, and it’s almost easy to forget there’s a third person with them.  
  
“Who’s this Byungho?”  
  
Jongyul is round to visit, as usual. He’d let Kyungsoo get up to answer the door himself, since he hates being coddled, but curiosity over who’s come knocking had obviously gotten the better of him.  
  
“Hyung,” he says, and Jongyul moves to stand beside him, touching at his hand. This gesture – one he’s so used to – never seemed so intimate before as when Sungki’s eyes seem to zoom in on it, intrigued. “Jongyul,” he corrects himself, since Jongyul had told him recently he wanted them to drop all formality and address each other by their names. Kyungsoo’s still learning. “This is Sungki. He fought with me in the war. Sungki this is Jongyul. My friend.”  
  
Jongyul slides an arm over Kyungsoo’s shoulder even as he bends down in a polite bow. It’s something he’s always done, and Kyungsoo’s never questioned it, but all of a sudden, he finds himself wondering.  
  
Has Jongyul always been this touchy with him? Or has the lack of audience made Kyungsoo unaware?  
  
“Well Byungho,” Sungki starts, and his voice has cooled by a few degrees. But Kyungsoo just figures it’s because of Jongyul’s surprise appearance, that he’s not as comfortable talking in front of a stranger. “I gathered a couple of the old guys together and we’re going out for drinks and catching up tomorrow night. I was wondering if you’d like to come?”  
  
At this, Kyungsoo hesitates.  
  
He can feel two pairs of eyes on his face, awaiting an answer, but Kyungsoo doesn’t know what to say.  
  
One person he can deal with. But a group? It might be a bit much for him.  
  
He also remembers their old war-stories. How they’d recount old battles as victors and heroes often do. How they’d describe, in every detail, the bloodshed and the gore, and everything Kyungsoo doesn’t think he can relive about being on the battlefield.  
  
“Can I think about it?” Kyungsoo asks, and Sungki looks a little taken aback when he doesn’t explain himself further.  
  
“Sure,” he answers, still a little confused. But its only momentary, and after he’s given Kyungsoo the details about where and when the meeting is, he disappears down the street with a friendly wave.  
  
“So are you going to go?” Jongyul asks, his fingers sliding to Kyungsoo’s nape as he shuts the door and turns back into the house.  
  
It bothers him. How intimate this suddenly feels. How… private he suddenly wants to keep it. As if Sungki’s eyes on the connection between his and Jongyul’s skin was invasive, unwelcome.  
  
Before he knows what’s happening, annoyance bubbles up within him, and he finds himself snapping: “I said I’d think about it, didn’t I?”  
  
He pushes Jongyul’s arm off, intent on striding back into the house without him, but emotions always make him giddy, and he stumbles and trips on the third footfall.  
  
And despite the undue verbal abuse, Jongyul’s arms are there to catch him again. Like always.  
  
Kyungsoo’s anger fades even faster than it had come, replaces itself with guilt, and he apologises for his behaviour.  
  
They go back to what they were doing before. Lying on mats spread out across the floor and listening to the radio, trying not to let the summer heat get to them.  
  
Kyungsoo can still feel the paths of Jongyul’s fingertips mapped into his skin. There are invisible fingerprints pressed all over his body, but Kyungsoo knows exactly where each and every one of them is, can feel the timid touches and gentle caresses, still.  
  
The silence between them grows thick. Stretching.  
  
Jongyul isn’t touching him anymore.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He ends up going out with the other men the next night after all.  
  
Jongyul had talked him into it. “I think it would be a good idea if you went,” he’d told him quietly, just as he was leaving later that day. The sun was just setting, haloing around the edges of his frame, turning the stray hairs around his face into golden streaks of light. It had made it impossible to say no. “You don’t have any friends, other than me, and the way you talk about them makes it seem like you really liked them, back then. It would be good to see them again, right?”   
  
The sunlight is an easy excuse though. Easier than admitting he can’t say no to Jongyul, regardless the time of day, and that he needs to get himself and his emotions together.  
  
They meet at one of the pojangmachas that’s not too far from his house for him to walk. He’s been here before, for soju and chicken, with Jongyul. The other man’s co-workers drag him there after work at least twice a week, and more than once, he’s been too drunk to get himself home, and has come knocking on Kyungsoo’s door in the early hours of the morning. Drunk Jongyul is overly-affectionate, and slurs his words, and makes Kyungsoo smile at the thought of him.  
  
It ends up being fine.  
  
Kyungsoo is as quiet as ever, and there are a lot of faces missing that he doesn’t dare question. But it ends up being fine anyway.  
  
And there are also people he’s missed – men he didn’t think he was ever going to get to see again. Like him, they all carry their scars, and he finds himself fitting right in all over again.  
  
No one wants to talk about the war. So they don’t.  
  
Mostly they talk about the now of things. Their wives. Their families. Their jobs and their new lives, now that everything’s being re-pieced. They get drunk and gripe about this and that. About nagging mothers and whining babies. About hard work and not getting enough sleep.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t have much to contribute, but he gets by.  
  
He missed them a lot, he realises. He liked them then, and he still does now.  
  
Sungki gives him a hard clap on the shoulder just before he stumbles his tipsy way home. It’s warm and affectionate, like the years in between the last time they saw each other and now didn’t happen.  
  
It makes him feel wanted.  
  
Granted, it isn’t quite the same as the way Jongyul strokes his hair while he’s dozing off, later that night, the other having stuck around to check up on him.  
  
But it’s good enough.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
This too, becomes routine.  
  
Like having Jongyul sneak his way into the corners of his every day, meeting up with the guys for drinks a couple times a week becomes non-negotiable. It’s something he  _must_  do it seems, or he feels like he’ll go insane.  
  
A couple of weeks into his new routine he notices Jongyul becomes a little scarcer. He writes it off as work being demanding – as usual – and tries not to let it bother him. But he’s gotten so used to this, to having Jongyul round so often they practically live together, to feeling his constant, reassuring little touches. Finding himself so often alone all of a sudden is much harder to deal with than he expected.  
  
And of course, Jongyul is easy to read when he’s upset, and in the few times Kyungsoo sees him,the signs are all there.  
  
It doesn’t take long for Kyungsoo to demand answers.  
  
Jongyul tells Kyungsoo he’s changed. That in just two weeks’ worth of spending time with his other friends, he’s gotten a little louder and more brash. That his angry outbursts happen just a little more often.  
  
And Jongyul doesn’t like it.  
  
The accusations escalate into a fight – one that leaves Jongyul in tears before he storms out. But a knock on the door later brings him back, drunk, before the night is over.  
  
Kyungsoo’s anger fades too quickly at the sight of him all messy around the edges and with tears smeared down his cheeks.  
  
“I’m s’rry,” Jongyul mumbles, slurred, as Kyungsoo slips an arm around him to lead him through the house. “’S not my place t’stop you seeing your friends. Dunno what got into me.”  
  
Kyungsoo tucks him in carefully, trying his best despite the fact that Jongyul clings to him like a koala, and it proves difficult when he refuses to let go.  
  
He can’t help but forgive him.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Maybe Kyungsoo’s just noticing more since that night, but they do seem to fight a lot now.  
  
Usually it’s over stupid stuff. Pointless shit that could be avoided if they both learnt to hold their tongues. But Jongyul’s taken to staring at him intently no matter what he does lately, with that look he can’t decipher. And it’s driving Kyungsoo up the wall.  
  
So Kyungsoo snaps at him over stupid shit. Drives their voices higher, sends Jongyul storming out.  
  
Later on, he’ll always apologise. But it’s not like Jongyul doesn’t do exactly the same thing to him the next night, and they seem to be stuck in a cycle at the moment.  
  
Tonight, it’s about something serious.  
  
Kyungsoo had tripped for what seemed like the eightieth time while trying to make dinner. Jongyul had risen to help him from his corner, where he’s been staring silently for the past fifteen minutes and driving Kyungsoo up the wall.  
  
And he’d snapped at him just because. Told him he didn’t need his help, and that he could take care of himself just fine. Just because he can.  
  
Jongyul had huffed, rolling his eyes, but sat back down regardless.  
  
It’s when he trips for the eighty-first time, and Kyungsoo feels like he can’t just fucking get it right, that he drops the mug of tea he was holding, watches it shatter into a million tiny pieces on the kitchen floor, liquid sloshing out around him and pooling under his feet.  
  
On purpose.  
  
He growls under his breath as he tries to calm himself down, and when he looks up, Jongyul’s staring right back at him, expression dark.  
  
“You need to go to therapy,” he says, voice measured and steady. “See a psychiatrist.”  
  
And if Kyungsoo were any closer, he just might punch him in the face.  
  
“No.”  
  
“These outbursts. Your mood swings. It’s not healthy, Byungho. I really think you –”  
  
“I said no!” Kyungsoo’s yelling now. It cuts Jongyul off, makes him shut his mouth right up, his eyes going wide. Kyungsoo thinks, that if he’d had another mug in his hand in that moment, he probably would have thrown it, so maybe Jongyul has a point.  
  
Not that he’ll ever admit that.  
  
He’s never setting so much as one  _toe_  near the door of a psychiatrist’s office. The idea is utterly appalling to him, makes his stomach roll with nausea and fear.  
  
Jongyul is silent for a moment, and when his voice comes back, it’s quieter.  
  
“I just want what’s best for you,” he says.  
  
“You need to choose between being my therapist and being my friend, Jongyul,” Kyungsoo breathes. In and out, in and out.  
  
A beat of silence passes.  
  
Jongyul gets up. Something ugly passes over his face, but it’s only a quick moment before he manages to hide it again.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, turning for the door. “Your  _friend_.”  
  
He spits the last word. Like it’s repulsive. And then he’s gone.  
  
Kyungsoo is lost. He thought he was following the conversation, but now he’s not so sure.  
  
He doesn’t understand what Jongyul meant by that. Like being his friend is somehow not good enough.  
  
When he takes a step towards the door, he cuts his foot on one of the shards of his broken mug, and Jongyul is lost to the night.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He comes back, inevitably. Like he always does – sloppy from alcohol, with mussed hair, and swayed steps.  
  
It’s bad tonight. Kyungsoo opens the front door and only gets a split second to blink blearily at the man in front of him before Jongyul’s head sags forward to land on his shoulder, and he mumbles something that sounds a lot like “I’m sorry,” into Kyungsoo’s shirt.  
  
Kyungsoo sighs, letting Jongyul get his bearings as the two of them sway, just slightly, together.  
  
“Why d’we have to fight so much?” Jongyul asks now, and Kyungsoo wishes he had an answer. “Don’ wanna fight with you.”  
  
He raises a hand to place on Jongyul’s back, rubbing little circles there.  
  
“I don’t get you,” he tells him.  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“I don’t understand what you meant earlier.” Kyungsoo can’t help the sadness from creeping into the edges of his voice, the corners of his mouth pulling down. “Don’t you want to be my friend?”  
  
Jongyul takes a moment to respond, since he seems to be trying to stand back up again. He steadies himself with hands on Kyungsoo’s shoulders, straightening up to his full height, though he still can’t quite keep himself still. By the time he’s made it up there, Kyungsoo thinks he might have forgotten the question.  
  
“You’re s’important to me, Byungho,” Jongyul tells him, oddly sincere. And Kyungsoo would laugh, usually, at something like that. But right now, he doesn’t feel like it.  
  
They’re standing close enough that the front of their shirts brush together. Jongyul is warm where the night air is cool around them, and he smells like soju.  
  
He’s so much taller, Kyungsoo realises. Even now that he isn’t wheelchair-bound anymore, Jongyul is just so much taller.  
  
He raises tentative hands to cup Kyungsoo’s cheeks. The caresses are gentle and affectionate, and Kyungsoo thinks it’s probably a drunk-Jongyul thing, just lets him figure things out and do what he needs to.  
  
“I like you s’much,” he tells him, like that isn’t redundant by now.  
  
In the next moment, Jongyul tries to lean down. Except he’s drunk, so instead, he lurches forward, with all of his weight, onto Kyungsoo.  
  
And kisses him.  
  
A million things happen in Kyungsoo’s head all at once.  
  
The fact that Jongyul has actually kissed him only registers  _after_  he’s thrown him off, only after he’s screwed his eyes shut, clutching at his head to stop try and stop his own full-blown panic before it starts.  
  
Because the last time someone dropped all of their weight on him like that, it was Youngchul and he was dying, and it had been a minute before Kyungsoo had lost his own leg.  
  
He doesn’t want to remember.  
  
But Youngchul’s eyes were so crazy, so beyond anything that could be saved and Kyungsoo –  
  
– doesn’t  _want_  to remember.  
  
He’s brought back to reality by a choked off sob, and when he opens his eyes, Jongyul is on the floor, clutching at his face. There’s blood seeping out from between his fingers, mixed with tears and pathetic, liquid choking noises, and the realisation that he’s done that – that  _Kyungsoo’s_  the one that pushed him off and hurt him like this – is lost on him.  
  
Because back on the battlefield, Youngchul bled too. Kyungsoo remembers raising his hands to push against his chest, and having endless blood flow from behind his palms. How it was hot and sticky, and he’d wanted, more than anything, to wash his hands. To wash the entire ordeal – the blood, the fighting, the death and the war – off of his body.  
  
He’s crouched in on himself when he comes back again. Cowering down on his own floor with his hands over his ears to stop hearing Youngchul beg him like that.  
  
Except the only sound now is Jongyul’s little whimpers and sniffles, and when Kyungsoo finally looks up at him, he’s taken his hands off of his face.  
  
He looks awful. The gash on his face from where he hit Kyungsoo’s bookcase is still bleeding, and his fingers are sticky with it. He’s cried watery, red tracks down his face. His lips are swollen and there’s snot and drool visible from how he still blubbers, pathetic.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t know what to say.  
  
“There’s a first aid kit in the bathroom,” he finally manages, between deep breaths and failed attempts to calm himself down.  
  
Jongyul doesn’t move for a good thirty seconds, and Kyungsoo begins wondering if he should help him.   
  
But then his own hands are shaking too much and he doesn’t think he’d be able to dress a wound if he tried.  
  
Besides. He doesn’t want to get blood on his hands.  
  
As soon as Jongyul disappears into the bathroom, he shuts himself in his bedroom and tries not to throw up.  
  
He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t go to Jongyul.  
  
He doesn’t tuck him in tonight.  
  
The house is completely silent, except for half an hour later, when the front door slides quietly open, and then closed again, after a second or two.  
  
Jongyul has let himself out, it seems.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They don’t talk about it.  
  
Jongyul comes back, the next day, like he always does. The only difference is that this time, there’s a heavy bandage covering half of his face, and he doesn’t look Kyungsoo in the eye.  
  
But neither of them bring it up.  
  
When Kyungsoo gives himself time to think about it, to really pick apart what happened, he feels like a dick. Because Jongyul probably thinks he threw him off because it was  _him_ , because Kyungsoo didn’t want to kiss him back.  
  
And then of course, comes the inevitable question. Did he want to kiss Jongyul? If the kiss had been nice and slow, steady and predictable, would he have reciprocated?  
  
He thinks about Jongyul. About his soft touches. About his lips.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t know.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They don’t talk about it until one day, roughly two weeks later, Jongyul starts crying.  
  
It’s out of nowhere. They’re just sitting in the kitchen together when suddenly, his face crumples, and there are tears  _everywhere_.  
  
It’s the terrible kind of crying too. The kind where he can’t stop hiccupping, breath hysterical, and the tears won’t stop even when he tries to smother them with his fingers. He shrinks back from Kyungsoo’s touch when he places a hand on his shoulder, and shakes his head, wordless.  
  
“Jongyul,” he tries to comfort. But Kyungsoo was never taught to be soft. He was only ever taught to be abrasive. Aggressive. So he clears his throat and tries again. “Jongyul, hey. What’s wrong?”  
  
Kyungsoo knows what’s wrong. Kyungsoo knows god damn well what’s wrong.  
  
“I t-tried to k-kiss you,” he sniffles, voice muffled from behind his hands. “And we’re not t-talking about it.”  
  
“Stop crying,” Kyungsoo says, because the noise is starting to become distressing and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He only succeeds in making Jongyul cry harder. “Let’s talk about it now then.”  
  
“Y-you pushed me off,” Jongyul blubbers, fighting hard when Kyungsoo gets a hold of his wrists to pry his hands from his face, but ultimately losing. His eyes are bloodshot, miserable and accusing when they fix on Kyungsoo’s and he next speaks. “You’re disgusted with me.”  
  
“I’m not.”  
  
“Yes you are.”  
  
“Jongyul I’m not, it’s just – you – I –”  
  
He stops when he realises what he has to tell Jongyul. That he’s going to have to relive the very thing he’s been trying to bury all this time.   
  
But he’s going to do it, if only to make the other man stop crying.  
  
He still doesn’t know if he wants to kiss Jongyul. But if he’s willing to do this much for him, he sure must feel a hell of a lot for him.  
  
Kyungsoo draws his knees up to his chest. Jongyul’s watching him now, still sniffling, so he passes a hand over his eyes to cover them.  
  
“When I lost my leg,” he starts, taking a deep breath, and Jongyul stills completely beside him. “A dying man fell on me, pinning me down. I couldn’t escape the blast from the grenade, but his body shielded me somewhat, and saved my life.”  
  
He lets his hand drop now and looks up at Jongyul. He only realises he’s shaking when the other moves to take his hand, fingers wet and grimy with tears.  
  
“When you… stumbled into me like that, I – I flashbacked. I didn’t even realise you were kissing me, because I was too busy trying to get the body off me. I… I really thought I was back there, Jongyul.”  
  
Jongyul’s mouth is open in a little ‘o’, apology written all over his face as Kyungsoo continues.  
  
“And then you were bleeding and – and he was bleeding back then and –”  
  
His voice cracks and he has to stop. He feels like there’s a rock lodged in his throat and it aches.  
  
Something wet lands on one of his knees.  
  
He’s crying.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t remember the last time he cried.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Jongyul’s voice is cracking too, and now  _he’s_  crying again, and the both of them are just a mess. “I didn’t even realise – I’ve been making this about me the whole time, but –”  
  
He gets cut off when Kyungsoo chokes on a sob. It’s loud and it’s ugly, and it’s followed by another. And another. And yet another.  
  
Jongyul is soft and warm when he takes him into his arms. His forehead rests on Jongyul’s shoulder, ruining the other’s shirt with tears.  
  
There’s a soft voice shushing him through it all.  
  
And it’s then – somewhere between crying so hard he thinks he’s damaged his tear ducts, and pressing relatively dry eyes into the sleeve of Jongyul’s shirt. It’s then that he realises.  
  
He really, really wants to kiss Jongyul.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Crying makes you sleepy, so they end up dozing off together, in Kyungsoo’s bedroom. It’s when they’ve later woken, and Jongyul has fetched them both steaming mugs of tea, that he asks, shyly, just to confirm: “So it wasn’t about the kiss?”  
  
There’s red rimmed around both of their eyes, but Jongyul’s got it on his cheeks too.  
  
“It wasn’t about the kiss.”  
  
“So… if I kissed you now…”   
  
“Is that a question?” Kyungsoo’s smirking now. Just a little.  
  
Jongyul goes beet red. They’re both so close.  
  
“Can I kiss you?” He asks instead this time, voice dying out to a dramatic whisper.  
  
It’s almost too easy, for his fingers to find Jongyul’s and lace together, between them.  
  
“Please.”  
  
The first touch of Jongyul’s lips is hesitant, just a little brush, then a tentative press. His breath eases out, shaky, over the seam of Kyungsoo’s mouth as he pulls back, and licks his lips.  
  
He looks so unsure.  
The air around them is silent, still. As if heavily charged and waiting for either of them to make a move.  
  
Kyungsoo’s lips tingle. It’s him who surges forward, in the end.  
Jongyul sighs into this next kiss, letting the tension ebb out of his shoulders as he brings his hands up to grasp at Kyungsoo’s own. His lips are slightly wet from when he licked them, and, when Kyungsoo peeks the tip of his tongue out to trace the lower one, still taste slightly salty from his earlier tears.  
  
The kisses are sweet and innocent, at first. But everything goes downhill when Kyungsoo puts one of his hands on Jongyul’s outer thigh, and five minutes later he’s got the older man in his lap, hands carding through his hair as Jongyul cradles the back of his head lovingly while they make out.  
  
It’s hot in the bedroom. Kyungsoo feels on  _fire_.  
  
They detach with a wet, sucking kind of sound, and Jongyul just stares down at him for a moment, dazed and panting, before he realises himself. And when he does, he flusters, trying to scramble back off of Kyungsoo immediately, and yelping: “I’m sorry!”  
  
But Kyungsoo just chuckles, catching him by the waist and holding him in place.  
  
“It’s fine, Jongyul,” he tells him, voice hoarse. Because he knows what Jongyul  _thinks_  is wrong. “It’s okay.”  
  
But nothing about this reminds him of Youngchul.  
  
Nothing about the warm, comforting weight of Jongyul across his thighs reminds him of being pinned down against his will and near-death experiences. Not when Jongyul is pliable and self-conscious in his lap, shifting restlessly against his rapidly forming hard-on.  
  
Jongyul’s getting there too, if the bulge poking into his stomach is any indication. Kyungsoo knows where this is going.  
  
The other stills only for a moment when he abandons his attempts at escape. Then he moves, rocking his hips against Kyungsoo, his arms dropping down to brace on the younger’s shoulders as his mouth falls open in pleasure.  
  
The low moan sounding out in the room surprises Kyungsoo. Because instead of Jongyul, it’s  _him_  moaning, reacting to the heat pooling in his own groin, hands moving down to grasp at Jongyul’s hips to urge him on, keep him going.  
  
He’s messed around with a couple of girls back in high school before, but other than that, he’s not exactly experienced. And nothing in his frame of reference ever felt like  _this_  – this good or this important. Kyungsoo has nothing to compare it to, and he finds himself nervous as Jongyul kisses him again, all messy and passionate. Like it’s his first time all over.  
  
He’s had his doubts about sex before. Because even if there  _was_  another person who wanted him like that, would it be enough? Would his leg hold out? Would he, someone who has been teaching himself  _not_  to feel as much as possible, be able to let himself go, come off as anything other than cold and detached?  
  
But then Jongyul pulls back, and his lips are all slicked up and his cheeks are flaming when he asks: “Is this okay?”  
  
And  _this_  is not Youngchul. This has nothing to do with bullets or grenades or blood and death. This is warm, nervous,  _perfect_  Jongyul, right on top of him and too close to let go, like he did last time.  
  
So he nods. And it turns out that none of his worries even matter anymore.  
  
Because Jongyul is careful. Every movement he makes is slow and measured, and he asks “can I take this off?” before each garment he helps Kyungsoo shed. It’s not long before they’re both naked and it’s absolutely torturous – because Kyungsoo can feel every affectionate touch and sensual brush of skin, and the only thing he’s worrying about  _now_  is whether he’s going to be able to stop himself from coming embarrassingly fast.  
  
And when Jongyul thrusts their erections together and clings to him, nails digging into his upper arms in a little prickle of pain, he knows he won’t have to worry about being distant. Right now, he’s doing the opposite, trying to swallow down the complex little ball of emotions chasing up his throat. Because not only is there someone who cares about him and wants him like this, but it’s someone so wonderful – someone like Jongyul.   
  
Kyungsoo’s not sure how he got so lucky.  
  
Minutes later, Jongyul’s wrestling with a bottle of lotion, drizzling it over his fingers to make the slide easier. Kyungsoo gets to watch his face as he sits up on his knees and reaches behind himself, breaching his own entrance with one finger first, only to follow it up with a second and a third.  
  
His expression shifts as he works himself open, contorting with discomfort, then smoothing out to something milder before going slack with pleasure. Kyungsoo thinks he ought to participate somehow, instead of just watching with awe and increasing arousal, so he wraps one hand around Jongyul’s erection to jerk him off, making the other spit and weep with pleasure.  
  
“Enough,” Jongyul whispers, because now his voice is starting to go gruff, and he draws his fingers out of himself and reaches for Kyungsoo’s cock to slick him up. Then he lines up, one arm wrapping around Kyungsoo’s neck to cling to him, the other going down to steady Kyungsoo’s cock, and he sighs as he pushes himself down onto it.  
  
It’s tight. So much tighter than anything Kyungsoo’s ever experienced before, and he can’t help but dig his fingers into Jongyul’s hips and just hold on, gasping as he continues to sink down onto him. It feels like being strangled, but in a good way, like Jongyul’s taking all of his oxygen, replacing it with electricity and pleasure and heat.  
  
And  _god_ , but he wants nothing more but for Jongyul to move.  
  
He wants to buck up his hips, feel himself move inside Jongyul a little more, but he doesn’t. He grits his teeth and bears with it while Jongyul can only whimper, wrapping his other arm around Kyungsoo to just  _hold on_.  
  
Minutes later, Jongyul’s sniffling into his neck, getting a little fidgety as his hips twitch. Kyungsoo gulps, fingers pressing hard enough to bruise, and Jongyul draws back a little to look him in the eye.  
  
“Can I move?” he asks, and his eyes are wet. Kyungsoo guesses this must hurt, so he raises a hand to brush the other’s hair out of his eyes, cupping his cheek in an action so tender it makes Jongyul hiccup.  
  
“I should be the one asking you that.”  
  
Jongyul lifts himself then, and drops back down, right until he bottoms out, the backs of his thighs flush with the tops of Kyungsoo’s. And it’s the rawness of it all, the slide of skin against skin, the squelch and wetness when they move like that, that has Kyungsoo groaning loud, head dropping to rest against Jongyul’s shoulder and just breathing through it all.  
  
And Jongyul does it again. And again. And again.  
  
And soon, he’s picked up a pace, perched atop Kyungsoo’s thighs and riding him fast, the sound of gasps and unavoidable moans and laboured breathing so loud in the otherwise silent hanok. He’s got Kyungsoo’s face tilted up now, cupped in his hands as he traces that jawline with his thumbs, tender and passionate all at once as he kisses him.  
  
It might not be as cautious as Jongyul wanted it to be. It’s fast and hot and primal with the slap of one body connecting with another, but Kyungsoo wouldn’t have it any other way, and he’s already so, so close.  
  
When he comes, seated deep inside of Jongyul, it’s the best thing he thinks he’s ever felt. He’s groaning and clinging on, and all at once, he’s too hot, too close to the edge, too full of pleasure and then – he lets it go, releasing and emptying himself inside of the other man. His vision goes white when he releases, even though his hips won’t stay still, canting up to meet Jongyul thrust for thrust.  
  
Jongyul is falling apart on top of him then, his speed lagging even as he tries, desperately, to keep on bouncing, to keep the pace and chase his own release. When Kyungsoo comes back to earth the first thing he does is take a hold of Jongyul’s cock, tugging only a couple of times to help him along before he comes too, white spilling between them, over both of them, before they both collapse.  
  
They’ve managed to heat up the small room all on their own, and it’s still too much to think about pulling a blanket over them, even as the sweat begins to cool. So Kyungsoo just lies there, one hand on Jongyul’s lower back, rubbing little circles there in an attempt to soothe the pain he knows the other must be feeling.  
  
“I really, really like you Byungho,” Jongyul murmurs, after a few minutes of silence, and rapidly decreasing heart rates.  
  
Jongyul is heavy. But instead of being scary, and throwing him back into memories he doesn’t want to relive, it feels more like a security blanket, a guarantee that Jongyul is right here with him too.  
  
Kyungsoo chuckles a little.  
  
“I figured,” he says. Then: “I like you too.”  
  
But they aren’t the words on the tip of his tongue.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
And so a new part of his life starts.  
  
The two of them become inseparable, and it almost feels like Jongyul lives more at his place than his own. He’d even joked that some of his housemates had asked if he was seeing someone, for him to away so often, and the two of them had laughed.  
  
But they both know it isn’t really that funny.  
  
A relationship between two men would be completely rejected by society, were they to come out, so they don’t. They both know that what they do during their late nights (and in the shower, since Jongyul insists it’s big enough) does not leave the four walls surrounding them, is not made for anybody’s ears but their own.  
  
Behind closed doors, they can be lovers, but out in the real world, they are just very close friends.  
  
Despite it all, Kyungsoo is happy. He thinks he knows that Jongyul means a little bit more than “I like you so much” every time he says it, and Kyungsoo returns the sentiment.  
  
Even if it goes unspoken, he’s never had someone love him like this. So purely, so unadulterated, and without condition.  
  
And so in this life, Kyungsoo gets to be happy. Kyungsoo gets to live as Moon Byungho, and kiss Bae Jongyul as much as he wants, and he is happy.  
  
It’s a simple kind of love. The peaceful kind. And Kyungsoo’s never felt more whole.  
  
But perhaps the universe is out to get him, or maybe, if there’s a god, he has a personal vendetta against Kyungsoo.  
  
Because it doesn’t last long.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“You have to go,” Jongyul tells him for a second time, two months later, when he’s pulled – unreluctantly – into yet another kiss. He’s smiling, lying on top of Kyungsoo just to be a tease, and the younger of the two groans.  
  
“I’d rather stay here with you,” Kyungsoo tells him, lying back down and carding fingers through the other’s hair.  
  
“Sungki will come looking for you if you don’t show up. You know he will,” Jongyul’s tracing the bridge of his nose with the tip of one finger now, staring down at Kyungsoo’s face, studying. “Do you really want him to catch us here, like this?”  
  
“No,” Kyungsoo sighs, and he half sits up, tipping Jongyul back. “Get off me then.”  
  
Jongyul complies with a pout, and it’s so cute that once he’s straightened out his clothes, Kyungsoo takes him by the hand and asks: “Walk with me?”  
  
It’s like these days, he can’t bear to leave Jongyul alone for even a moment longer than he has to. Maybe he’s just clingy.  
  
“Ok,” Jongyul nods.  
  
Their hands naturally separate as soon as the front door opens.  
  
It’s hard, Kyungsoo thinks, reminding himself that in public, he has to put a little distance between the two of them. He’s seen raised eyebrows, once or twice, when his hand has slipped around Jongyul’s waist of its own accord, and it’s a conscious effort not to touch the other man as much as he wants to when they’re out.  
  
Not that Jongyul’s any better. He’s slipped up just as much, if not more, than Kyungsoo has.  
  
They reach the end of the street, just before Kyungsoo will have to turn, and – he knows – Jongyul will have to leave. He’s about to say good bye when the other catches his hand, making him look up in question.  
  
“I miss you when you’re not with me,” Jongyul tells him, and he’s standing so close. Kyungsoo glances around in alarm, but there’s no one. It’s not a particularly busy street their on, and hardly anyone comes this way.  
  
“We’re not apart very much,” Kyungsoo replies, succumbing to the temptation of taking Jongyul’s hand in his own and playing with his fingers. Moments later, Jongyul is leaning down to kiss him – risky but quick, pulling back only a small distance before he smiles.  
  
Kyungsoo knows he’s already late. That he was meant to meet up with the guys about ten minutes ago, verging on fifteen, but he can’t quite help but linger.  
  
“Will you go home now?” he asks, and Jongyul swings their hands between them, idly. “Or will you go back to mine?”  
  
He’s a little hopeful that Jongyul won’t leave him tonight yet.  
  
“Yours,” he says with a smile, and their little bubble is verging on so intimate that they don’t even notice –  
  
“Byungho.”  
  
A third voice.  
  
Their hands disconnect first, before anything else, before they even turn to see Sungki standing there, having just come around the corner, it looks like.  
  
With a slight frown on his face, the newcomer glances down at the empty space that once held their joined hands.  
  
“I was just coming to look for you,” he says, and suddenly, Kyungsoo is afraid.  
  
Very afraid.  
  
Because he doesn’t know how much Sungki saw. Was it just the hand-holding? Or was he there for the kiss too?  
  
From deep within his memories, and ugly little snippet surfaces.  
  
And he’s back in the trenches when Sungki was talking about his ‘little cocksucker neighbour’, and how he’d ‘beat the shit out of him’. The other men had all laughed.  
  
He feels nauseous.   
  
“Yeah I was just – um. I was just coming,” he says, and Sungki is silent. He bids a quiet goodbye to Jongyul, who turns back the way they had come, and doesn’t touch him.  
  
But Sungki doesn’t say anything much when he falls into step with him, and soon, they’re with the other men.  
  
He allows his stomach to settle, somewhat. Because if Sungki had  _that_  much of a problem with his neighbour, back in the day, surely he’d say something to Kyungsoo, if he suspected he was of the same nature?  
  
For the rest of his worry, there’s always alcohol, and the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach has faded to almost nothing by the time the night is up.  
  
He convinces himself the little twinge of nausea he still feels is just from the alcohol.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He stumbles his way home, late, that night. Normally Sungki would offer to walk him home, worries too much about him struggling with his leg, but tonight he had cited something about ‘the missus complaining too much’ when he stayed out late, and had had to leave early.  
  
Kyungsoo’s busy fumbling with his front door and wondering if Jongyul will still be up when he hears something strange.  
  
From somewhere inside the house, there’s a pronounced thump.  
  
And then a little whimper.  
  
His blood runs cold.  
  
He  _knows_  that whimper.  
  
Ripping the door open, he stumbles even as he runs. He doesn’t know where he’s going, until he hears the thumping noise again, and turning into the kitchen brings to light a scene he’ll never be able to un-see, one that will feed all of his nightmares every day for the rest of his life.  
  
Sungki lied about going home, it seems.  
  
Because said man is in Kyungsoo’s kitchen, standing over Jongyul, who’s on the floor. Just as Kyungsoo gets there, he aims a sharp kick at Jongyul’s ribcage, and suddenly, he knows what the thumping noise was.  
  
Jongyul doesn’t even respond to the kick this time. Kyungsoo doesn’t even know if he can.  
  
Because his clothes are all ripped and bruises are blooming, like flowers, all over his exposed skin. One eye is swollen so much that he can’t open it, and there’s spit and blood dripping down his chin from a cut lip. His nose too, looks broken, and is bleeding everywhere, and one arm is bent where there isn’t a joint, the bone clearly snapped.  
  
Kyungsoo thinks he’s going to be sick.  
  
“He turned you into one of them,” Sungki speaks now, and Kyungsoo’s never hated anyone so much, never found someone so vile as right now, with the man standing in front of him. “I’m doing you a favour by getting rid of him.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s head swims.  
  
“Getting rid of…?” he tries, but he loses his voice halfway when a fresh wave of hysteria rolls over his body.  
  
Jongyul is choking now, coughing up red, tears and spit and mucous all down the front of his face. And there’s so  _much_  blood and it’s everywhere, and part of Kyungsoo panics, because he doesn’t need to be thrown back into his past right now, not when Jongyul needs him so much.  
  
But then Sungki makes a move, bending down and reaching for Jongyul’s neck and –  
  
“Don’t you fucking touch him,” Kyungsoo spits, and then he’s moving.  
  
Because this time, Youngchul and the explosion don’t even factor in, don’t even cross his mind. The outburst seems to surprise Sungki, because he looks up, and suddenly Kyungsoo’s right there in front of him.  
  
And he remembers. He remembers what war was like, but this time, it’s not what it put him through he focusses on. Not the trauma.  
  
It’s what he was trained to do.  
  
Destroy the enemy.  
  
The knife he picked up on his way to get to Sungki sinks between his ribs almost too easily. Like he’s made of something soft, like butter.  
  
The fact that he’s stabbed Sungki only registers after he’s done it, but he doesn’t regret a thing.  
  
When his senses come back, there’s so much noise.  
  
Sungki is screaming, shouting curses and accusations as Kyungsoo twists the knife and he writhes, dropping onto the floor next to Jongyul’s ominously still body.  
  
And when he pulls the knife out, what seems like a tidal wave of blood washes over his hands, but he can’t concentrate on that, even for a second.  
  
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, with Jongyul’s head cradled on his lap, searching desperately for a pulse. Praying so hard he’s still alive and not knowing what the fuck to do.  
  
It only feels like a minute, but it can’t be, because when he next looks up, someone’s grabbing his arm and tearing him away from Jongyul’s side.  
  
But to his relief, there are people helping Jongyul onto a gurney, carrying him through the house to the ambulance he can now suddenly hear.  
  
There is a woman crying near the front door as he’s assisted out. Men are muttering and throwing him dark looks, and only then does it register that the person walking next to him is a police officer.  
  
He doesn’t resist arrest.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Youngchul was pronounced dead on the scene, apparently. Jongyul is in hospital in a coma.  
  
There’s no hope in hell that he’s going to get to see him.  
  
Kyungsoo does not get parole.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Were the law fair and even, Kyungsoo would most likely get a couple years’ worth of jail time maximum – the defence of necessity, that he was killing an immediate threat to someone else’s life, should hold up.  
  
But the law is not fair.  _People_  rule the law, rather than the other way round, and it is petty, biased, and discriminatory.  
  
His trial is long and dragged out. Everything comes to light during the proceeds.  
  
Everything.  
  
About how him and Sungki fought alongside each other, about how they were friends. About how he lost his leg. About how he met Jongyul, and the other man helped him recover.  
  
About how they loved each other.  
  
Kyungsoo sees Jongyul’s family amongst those in attendance. They’re hard to miss because they look so much like him. But they do not look like the soft, warm people Jongyul described to him so often. They look tired, angry, haggard.  
  
Grief can do that to a person, Kyungsoo supposes.  
  
When they find out that he and Jongyul were lovers, Jongyul’s mother cries.  
  
No one in the court room has any sympathy for him anymore, after that. Not the judge. Not the witnesses. Not even his own, harried, state-provided lawyer, for all he even cared in the first place.  
  
The internal damage from Youngchul’s assault proves too much for Jongyul in the end. He dies at 10:43am on the morning of Kyungsoo’s trial, and his family are not in court that day.  
  
Kyungsoo feels his last tie to reality crack, and something deep inside of him is all messed up, because the numbness is back.  
  
Maybe it’s a good thing he’s sentenced to death after all.

 

 


	2. part ii

 

 

In this life, Kyungsoo does not remember.  
  
In this life, he is Choi Sungjin. He is silence and obedience to two strict, religious parents. He is the grey area between wrong and right no matter how hard he tries to please them.  
  
By middle school he thinks he wants to kiss his best friend. Except he must be confused – because his best friend is does not have long, flowy hair, or a pretty skirt. His best friend is a boy, and his name is Sanghoon.  
  
Kyungsoo slips out of that grey area, and something deep inside of him breaks.  
  
By university, he has outgrown Sanghoon, anxious crushes, and late nights spent wondering whether telling his parents is a good idea, whether they will be able to fix him.  
  
Now he is an enigma, a duality. During the day he is Sungjin. The quiet but helpful classmate who everyone likes, but very few actually  _know_. The one who will show up to your study group with a smile, but politely decline drinks with you and your friends later because he’s ‘busy’ and ‘maybe next time’.  
  
There never  _is_  a next time.  
  
Because at night, Kyungsoo has far better things to do. At night, he is false names and pretty promises. Whispers of smoke and brushes of skin all wrapped up in leather and a smirk so sharp it could cut.  
  
And it does, because it’s never there when morning comes, and  _that’s_  what’s painful.  
  
Unless you count the lingering traces of liquor and smoke he’s left on countless pillows, the soft squeaks of front doors opening in early hours, when the owners of those homes are asleep.  
  
No one is untraceable, after all.  
  
But Kyungsoo comes as close as it gets.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**_Seoul, South Korea, 1997_**  
  
  
  
Seoul, as far as cities go, is not really known for having a seedier side. But every city, no matter how up to shape it is, has a few dark corners, and this one is no exception. Kyungsoo knows a few, and tonight, he’s at his favourite haunt, nursing the dregs of his drink as he decides whether to order another, or cut his losses for the night and run.  
  
He’s not in the mood for it all, really. The thrill of the chase is lost on him tonight, and besides, not that he’s been paying the closest of attention, but he hasn’t seen anyone that he thinks he could stomach for more than about five minutes.   
  
“You know that guy’s been staring at you the whole night, right?” The bartender asks, having sidled up to his end of the bar for a chat some time ago, and sending a pointed look off somewhere over Kyungsoo’s shoulder. Business isn’t exactly bustling at this joint, and Kyungsoo’s a regular, so they’ve taken to making small talk in those in-between moments that both of them can spare.  
  
“Which one?” Kyungsoo raises a brow in question but does not turn, tipping the rest of his drink back and feeling the liquid slide down his throat with a dull burn when he swallows.  
  
“Nine o clock near the wall,” the bartender says, busying himself with wiping down the counter, as Kyungsoo finally turns to meet eyes with a stranger. “Pretty little thing.”  
  
Kyungsoo isn’t shy about staring, though the stranger seems to be, looking down at the table top, and – it’s hard to tell from this distance but – he might be blushing. Why he didn’t notice this one earlier, Kyungsoo isn’t sure, because he’s inclined to agree with the bartender.  
  
The stranger has full lips and a sharp jawline, and something about it is so lewd. Because how can someone be so bashfully innocent, and yet at the same time, so attractive in such a blatantly sexual way? Even from this distance Kyungsoo can tell he’s tall, that he’s cut from the same lines as ballet dancers and models, and something in his stomach burns with want.  
  
“I take it you agree with me?” The bartender is smirking when he turns back around.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t answer the question directly, but fishes his wallet out of his pocket and lays some notes down flat on the countertop.   
  
“Pour me two,” he says, silkily, and the smirk looking back at him grows.  
  
It seems to be true, what the bartender said. Because when Kyungsoo turns around – this time with a drink in each hand – and gets up, the man is looking at him again. His eyes flit away as Kyungsoo approaches, but once he draws near the table where he sits, he looks up, and locks eyes with Kyungsoo’s.  
  
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Kyungsoo asks, putting the drink down in front of him, and sliding onto the stool across from where he sits at a little table. He glances down at the drink, curiously, before wrapping a hand around it, and obviously no one taught this man not to accept drinks from strangers.  
  
Looks like he isn’t the regular clientele. At least Kyungsoo’s not going to roofie him, but it’s not like  _he_  knows that.  
  
“Joonho,” he replies, after a moment spent looking up shyly from behind his lashes. He looks young – but not so young that Kyungsoo feels guilty about doing this. “What about you?”  
  
“Youngjin,” Kyungsoo lies easily. A new conquest, a new name – that’s the rule. “Nice to meet you.”  
  
Joonho is quiet as he sips his drink. He’s definitely new here.  
  
“Haven’t we met before?” he suddenly asks, with a slight frown, and Kyungsoo starts a little, because  _that_  isn’t good.  
  
But taking a second, long, hard look at him, he really doesn’t think he’s seen Joonho before, out in the real world. It’s not like he’s the kind of face a person would forget easily, so perhaps he’s just mistaking Kyungsoo for someone else.  
  
Besides. It’s not like someone from Kyungsoo’s real life would recognise him right now – sweater vests and khakis traded out for dark denim and leather. He’s perfected this little disguise of his. Real-life Sungjin wears glasses, doesn’t drink or smoke, and sure as hell doesn’t hang out in seedy bars near midnight. If anything, Joonho thinking he recognises him is a good sign he  _doesn’t_  know him from anywhere that matters.  
  
“I’m sure I’d remember someone as good looking as you,” he says smoothly, throwing on a smirk for good measure. “I don’t think so, sweetheart.”   
  
Joonho flusters, cheeks colouring rapidly, and it’s cute. But Kyungsoo doesn’t really do the whole feelings thing when it comes to these encounters, so he pushes those thoughts aside in favour of wondering what exactly Joonho’s mouth could do, if he put his mind to it.  
  
“So you’re… what? A student?” Kyungsoo asks, and Joonho nods, looking up at him again. “Where?”  
  
He always double checks, just in case. The last thing he needs is to run into some one-night stand on campus the next day and have them ruin his carefully constructed reputation.  
  
“Yonsei,” Joonho replies, and Kyungsoo doesn’t know if Joonho knows, but he’s sort of staring again.  
  
And he can’t quite tell what that look means. Usually, people are easy to read for Kyungsoo, but with this man, he can’t tell if the desire or the interest are mutual, and it’s frustrating.  
  
Something about it all unsettles him, but he can’t quite pinpoint what.  
  
“You must be smart then,” Kyungsoo says, laying on the flattery.  
  
“I guess,” Joonho shrugs. He’s barely touched his drink. “What about you?”  
  
“I’m working,” Kyungsoo lies yet again. It comes so easily after the first few times. “Software development.”  
  
He frowns at that, and it’s the first real expression he’s shown other than wide-eyed and unreadable tonight.  
  
“Oh,” he says, and Kyungsoo doesn’t get what about his answer Joonho doesn’t like. “I thought – I mean, um – You look like a student, I guess.”  
  
Kyungsoo decides to overlook the stammering. Joonho seems a little odd in general anyway.  
  
“I look young, right?” Kyungsoo laughs, trying to play it off lightly. Joonho’s frown does not lift. “I can’t help my baby face, you know.”  
  
It’s when the other man does not reply that Kyungsoo decides it’s time for action. Usually, he’d spend much longer charming a person up, but Joonho seems vastly unresponsive to everything he says, choosing instead to stare at him in an almost  _puzzled_  manner. Kyungsoo can’t tell if that’s just his face, or if he’s just not used to being hit on. But with looks like his, he severely doubts it.  
  
And besides, even though he’s very,  _very_  attractive, there’s still that little something that’s…  _off_  about him. Kyungsoo can’t quite put his finger on it, but he’s thoroughly affected.  
  
“I’m going out back for a smoke,” he says, rummaging in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes. “Care to join me?”  
  
Joonho says nothing, but stands nonetheless, and Kyungsoo takes that as a yes. On the way to the back door, he sees the bartender smirk at him, because he knows the drill, and Kyungsoo rolls his eyes in response.  
  
The back door of the bar leads out into a dingy little alleyway, and no one much comes here. It’s dark, the only light from a street lamp a good distance away, on the main road, and Kyungsoo’s lighter clicks into vivid light, illuminating the contours of Joonho’s unsure face for a moment before fading into blackness again.  
  
“Want one?” Kyungsoo offers, holding the pack out to Joonho, leaning back against the ragged brick of the alleyway wall. Joonho shakes his head.  
  
“I don’t smoke,” he says.  
  
“Well.” Kyungsoo pockets his cigarettes, pausing in between words to take a drag and puff a barely-visible cloud of smoke into the space between them. “Maybe you could put your mouth to better use then.”  
  
Silence.  
  
Kyungsoo wasn’t expecting it to work anyway.  
  
He’s about to wave it off with a joke when Joonho steps up towards him. His knees meet the floor seconds later, biting into concrete and dirt, and Kyungsoo’s cock is already starting to swell.  
  
Joonho’s hands shake as he undoes Kyungsoo’s fly, obviously not used to this. He almost feels bad for a moment, but then Kyungsoo remembers himself. He’s only in this whole thing for the sex, after all. Not to care about other people and their feelings, or their dumb, drunk decisions.  
  
As soon as he starts caring, it’s end-game for him. He isn’t like those other guys that want to settle down with another man, who lobby for the government to stop sexuality-based discrimination, and to legalise same-sex marriage.  
  
_That’s_  disgusting.  
  
And  _this_  is purely physical.  
  
And it’s easy to convince himself of that when Joonho slips his cock out of his boxers, and nothing feels better than those timid touches against his skin, that first, uncertain little lick. Kyungsoo pushes his hips forward then, the head brushing against Joonho’s cheekbone instead of pushing inside like he planned.  
  
And it’s not what he wants, really, so he buries a hand in soft, dark hair and guides the younger forward, groaning softly at the wet, delicious friction when those lips finally part to take the him in.  
  
He doesn’t push Joonho, to start with, merely letting him get a feel for it, letting him soak the head in his mouth before he sinks down halfway, steadying himself with light hands on Kyungsoo’s hipbones. He’s got his eyebrows furrowed in concentration, but then, when he tries to sink down a little further, and Kyungsoo’s hips stutter forward impatiently, he pulls back coughing, and flicks large, watery eyes up to look at him.  
  
And Kyungsoo realises, after he’s recovered, and starts all over, mouth slow, and one gentle hand caressing the base, that Joonho is extremely inexperienced with giving blow jobs, that this might even be his first time.  
  
But he doesn’t want to believe it.  
  
Because the sight of Joonho, all rosy-cheeked and on his knees like that, is quite possibly one of the most erotic things he’s seen in his life. And he wants to blame how close to the edge he already feels on how devastatingly attractive the other man is, but honestly, that’s not enough to get him like this.  
  
Joonho’s technique is sloppy, at best, and Kyungsoo’s been with men who could deepthroat like the best of them. So that doesn’t explain why he’s got sweat all under his collar, gulping heavily to stop the groan from working its way past his lips when Joonho pulls off with a wet, debauched kind of noise to pant and catch his breath.  
  
Kyungsoo really doesn’t like it. The whole thing. It’s just throwing him off.  
  
“C’mon babe,” he grunts, hand back in his hair to push him forward. Because it’s easier to just get this over with and leave, sleep it off and pretend he didn’t come from his cock being in some amateur’s mouth for five minutes the night before.  
  
Joonho lets Kyungsoo have his way, doesn’t fight against it even when Kyungsoo pushes all the way in and he gags. His eyes are still watering, and then there are tears streaming down his cheeks because Kyungsoo is fucking his face, and by the time he comes down his throat and lets go, Joonho has to go full hands and knees from how hard he coughs.  
  
When he looks up, he’s a mess. His face is wet with tears and his nose is running, and there’s a little dribble of come that’s managed to leak its way out of the corner of his mouth.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t help him up as he tucks himself back into his pants and does up his fly.  
  
But Joonho manages on his own, and by the time he’s finished and he looks up, the other’s all in his personal space again, reaching forward to grasp his shoulders, leaning down and kissing him.  
  
And it’s fucking gross because Kyungsoo can taste  _himself_  on Joonho’s mouth when he does that, but also because he doesn’t  _do_  this, all the touchy-feely romantic shit only the most annoying of hook-ups always try with him.  
  
All of that is lost on him though, and he stands still, momentarily rooted to the spot as this odd feeling of déjà vu and nostalgia washes over him. Like he’s felt those lips on his before, those same calloused hands have touched his skin, and by the time he remembers that no, he doesn’t know who the  _fuck_  Joonho is, the other has managed to work desperate lips down to his jaw, pressing and mouthing into him like his life depends on it.  
  
He pushes Joonho back so hard that he almost falls, sent stumbling back into the opposite wall of the alley. Joonho stares at him then, shocked and wide-eyed and accusing, like  _he’s_  the one that just decided to go make out with a complete stranger like they were long-lost lovers or some shit, and Kyungsoo can only scoff.  
  
“Don’t get the wrong idea kid,” he says, and only now does he realise that somewhere in between having Joonho’s lips around his dick and having them on his mouth, did his cigarette fall to the ground beside him, the faint light of the last embers dying brighter in the dark alleyway than they should be. He stomps on it. “I’m not your boyfriend.”  
  
Joonho doesn’t say anything more, just continues to stare at him. And then there’s an odd little fragile sound, something that’s so undeniably human, and Joonho’s face is crumpling in on itself.  
  
The first sob that wracks Joonho’s body is downright unsettling for Kyungsoo to watch. The second makes him feel oddly nauseous, and by the third, he’s so disoriented, he doesn’t think to even wonder why the  _fuck_  the other man is sobbing in the first place.  
  
But Kyungsoo feels sick, sick, sick, and a whirlwind of emotions he can’t place – emotions that don’t even feel like his  _own_  – are sweeping through his body, and he just has to get out.  
  
Joonho doesn’t call out to him when he pushes his way back into the bar. There’s no one following him by the time he makes it out the other side, and he doesn’t know why he expected it.  
  
The night air is colder out here, since the alleyway was at such an angle that they were sheltered from the wind a little. It’s unexpectedly chilly, and Kyungsoo has to pull his jacket tight around himself before he starts walking, takes himself home.  
  
The apartment is quiet when he gets back. Empty.  
  
He has to get up for class in the morning.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
His walk to the subway to get to campus is a short one, usually. But this morning, he has to take a detour, because there’s police cars and danger tape all over the street he normally takes, and he can’t get past all the bystanders.  
  
“He jumped. I saw it,” one of them had murmured to another when he was still within earshot, and they  _are_  standing next to some pretty tall buildings, he realises.  
  
Kyungsoo thinks that’s a really fucking stupid way to go.  
  
He scoffs a little to himself as he tugs his backpack higher up onto his shoulders, and turns around, deciding to take the long route instead.  
  
He misses the train he normally takes and ends up being late for his first class.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Three years later, his life is on a different track. He’s stopped seeing men, and his girlfriend, who he does not love, tells him she is pregnant.  
  
He knows what will happen when he calls his parents. He knows what the right thing to do is, and he knows he will have to marry her.  
  
It doesn’t take long, in the end, to drive him up to the top of a building too, and he laughs a little to himself, thinking of that suicide, way back then, that he scoffed at.  
  
Maybe this has been a long time coming. Maybe this is about more than Miyoung and the baby, and the fact that his salary won’t cover all three of them.  
  
The last thing he sees before he jumps is, peculiarly, something he had almost forgotten. Something he had almost forgotten, and wished he had, and had spent the last three years trying to erase.  
  
It’s Joonho’s eyes, and they only leave his mind once he has tumbled through seventy metres of airspace, and said hello to the unforgiving concrete below.  
  
By the end of the day, the only evidence of Kyungsoo’s life is a faint red stain where he fell.  
  
And even that will be gone by the end of the week.

 

 


	3. part iii

 

 

In this life, Kyungsoo remembers.  
  
There are people and places and things in his mind that he doesn’t understand. Different times and different eras. Little snippets and hazy memories that do not belong to him, and make him feel dizzy with confusion for most of his childhood and adolescence.  
  
He tries to tell his mother that there are these other people living in his mind, but that just makes her worry, and she’s got enough on her plate with the divorce, and all.  
  
In this life, he is Min Byungchul, and he is withdrawn. Because no one seems to understand him, and one time, he heard his teachers whispering funny words like ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘multiple personality disorder’ to each other, and he was too little to understand but it sounded scary.  
  
Well he understands now, and no matter what everyone else might believe, he is  _not_  crazy.  
  
It gets clearer during university. Before it was just Byungho and Sungjin, but now he knows that both of them were… they were  _him_. And there are others now. There is Jongyul and Joonho, and they were his lovers.  
  
Or at least, Jongyul was. He understands now, that he was just confused when it came to Joonho. But his confusion caused him to treat the love of his first life like trash in the next.  
  
And now he aches for Jongyul. He misses him  _so_  much.  
  
But he’s starting to see him in every second stranger’s face, and Joonho out of the corner of his eye whenever he glances over an advert. And his mother’s starting to worry again that he never goes out, that he won’t ever find a nice girl to marry at this rate, and that just makes it worse.  
  
So he leaves.  
  
He packs his bags and goes to America, with nothing more than a suitcase of his own clothes, and the phantom trails of his mother’s tears when she pressed her face into his neck to sob out her goodbyes.  
  
Because all of this is starting to become hell for him. Not knowing whether it was all real, or if he’s just a basket case, and needs to be locked up for a very long time to get better. Not knowing if he  _can_  get better.  
  
And so he starts a new life. His English is accented, but good enough to get by, and his apartment has this hollow feeling that’s impossible to get rid of, even with all the windows and curtains open to air the place out, and the lights switched on.  
  
Or maybe that’s not the apartment. Maybe that’s just him, unable to get away.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**_New York, United States, 1976_**  
  
  
  
Kyungsoo does not like New York.  
  
He’s taken Korea for granted, he realises, and it’s not like he left Byungho and Jongyul or Sungjin and Joonho behind. Because they exist in his head, not the real world, and too late, he realises, his mind is something he cannot escape.  
  
But now he’s here. Stuck. In a strangely haunted, burning city, where he’s afraid of leaving his apartment for anything but work and the absolute necessities.  
  
His co-workers can’t pronounce his name. They call him ‘John’ or ‘Michael’ instead, and he lets them, because it’s easier than hearing them mutter slurs under their breath as he walks away, having them ask whether ‘that’s Chinese, or something’.  
  
No one in the city seems to have anything to do with themselves. Except drugs, and that’s not really something Kyungsoo’s keen to get involved with, so he has to find other means of entertainment.  
  
Which is why this particular Friday night sees him in one of New York’s sketchier establishments, drink in hand as he watches some young thing, who barely looks legally old enough, take off his clothes across the room from him. Or maybe that’s just Kyungsoo trying to chase the images of Jongyul –  _those_  ones, where he’s slack-faced from pleasure, the ones that make Kyungsoo burn up to think about – out of his mind.  
  
He isn’t all that interested in the strip show, if he’s honest. Men might be his thing, but that doesn’t automatically include barely-pubescent ones, and Kyungsoo’s more mesmerised by the clink and  _glug_  of drinks being poured, the murmured hum of conversation amongst other patrons, and the intriguingly peculiar pattern in the way the paint chips off of the wall closest to him.  
  
In more certain terms: Kyungsoo is drunk.  
  
And that’s exactly how he likes it, since alcohol softens all the edges in his mind, lays a warm and smothering blanket over most of the little ticks of memory and flashback that have him running on overdrive all the time. Alcohol makes him forget, even if it’s just for a little while, and maybe that’s becoming a bui dangerous for him. Because more often than not, his Friday nights are blurry and lost on him the morning after.  
  
The music fades out at the end of the act, and in the lulled interlude between songs, the boy on stage gathers his clothes and disappears into the stage wing. Kyungsoo tips his head back against the headrest of his seat, watches glittering smoke clouds rise from the laughing group of men closest to him.  
  
The music starts again.  
  
He isn’t watching the new performer, but hears the muffle of feet on hollow wood, and another song starts from tinny speakers. The conversation around them hushes somewhat as the audience becomes enthralled once again in the erotic display before them, but Kyungsoo’s neck is too heavy, the alcohol content in his blood too high for him to do anything but stare at the ceiling.  
  
He tilts sideways somewhere in between, maybe halfway through the act, head lolling lazily to the side, but luckily not enough to fall right out of his chair. The boy from before is back, clothed now – albeit scantily – and perched on the arm of another gentleman’s chair with a smile on his glossed lips. Kyungsoo watches, only distantly aware of what he is witnessing as the boy curls fingers around the man’s tie, leaning in to tease a whisper across his lips.  
  
Minutes into the scandalous exchange, the two of them get up, and disappear off into a side door. Kyungsoo’s not exactly surprised. It’s old news for places like this to act as a front for prostitution, and besides, it’s not like local law enforcement cares.  
  
He tears his eyes away from the door as it closes, and leans forward almost too much when he tries to focus back on the performance in front of him. The man on stage currently has his back to him, but he’s Asian, Kyungsoo notes, and  _very_  attractive, if the long legs and golden-dark skin are anything to go by.  
  
He turns around now, and Kyungsoo loses sight of his face momentarily in a flicker of multi-coloured lights, catching on the glitter on his skin, his artificially blonde hair. But then he emerges from the myriad of colours, and suddenly, Kyungsoo’s not too sure if he hasn’t had way more to drink than his body can handle.  
  
He tries to prop himself up in his chair, watch more attentively, but fighting his drooping eyelids proves troublesome.  
  
The images in his mind’s eye blur around the edges. Kyungsoo watches a familiar figure dance through a miasma of glitz and ambiguity.   
  
A million excuses pop up in his head in that moment – that he’s drunk, that the club is a haze of smoke and liquor and blurry lighting. Kyungsoo might be seeing things. He might just be projecting his own fantasies onto the attractive performer before him, and maybe Kyungsoo should call it a night and go home but –  
  
Nothing really explains it. Nothing  _really_  explains why the man on stage looks exactly like a younger Jongyul, a Joonho all done up in glitter and liner and sparkles.  
  
Kyungsoo is transfixed.  
  
The way this new Jongyul-Joonho moves is so sensual, limbs gliding through the air with practiced grace, and it’s beautiful. Kyungsoo only realises he’s staring when the man’s eyes slide to meet his own, locking there for only a second before the tiniest hint of a smirk pulls up one side of his mouth, and he looks away.  
  
And Kyungsoo can’t even think what that means because all he  _can_  think is that it’s happening again. That he’s not crazy. That maybe they’re soulmates – or something like that – and they’re going to meet each other in every lifetime, no matter what, over and over.  
  
And then, from somewhere deep within the smog that is his mind, a new memory surfaces. Vague, at first, but then settling with shaky clarity, making Kyungsoo’s breath come short.  
  
It’s of Joonho, face unsure as he asked Sungjin whether they’d met before.  
  
Kyungsoo reels.  
  
All this time, he’d thought – no.  _Sungjin_  had thought Joonho was just a strange kid, someone who wasn’t used to hook-ups and casual sex, and that’s why he freaked out like that. But if he  _remembered_  – if Joonho knew then what Kyungsoo knows now –  
  
Everything would make sense.  
  
He’s shocked still by the time the performance ends. So shaken and hyperaware of every tiny movement, every brush of fabric peeling off of now-bare skin. This Jongyul is all sensual lines and angles, and this Joonho won’t stop sending him coy little glances from under lashes Kyungsoo won’t believe are naturally that dark.  
  
The man onstage gathers his things now and turns to head backstage. Kyungsoo briefly wants to shout, to scream, to call after him in some way and make him stay, but he can’t. He stops himself in time from making a scene – but not because of his better judgement. It’s only because despite how fast his head is spinning, he’s still overwhelmingly drunk, and he can’t quite keep his body from sagging into his chair, can’t make his limbs obey his command.  
  
And now he feels sick.  
  
He’s still slowly working through his options of what to do now, another performer in whom he has no interest up on stage, when the same man appears through the side door, shirtless, and starts making his way across the floor to –  
  
to  _him_ , Kyungsoo realises.  
  
Right up until he’s perched on the arm of his chair, much like the other boy had been, earlier.  
  
“Hi darling,” he says now, voice pitched up and falsely sweet. Or maybe that’s just Kyungsoo, thinking he knows it from before when realistically, it could be different in this lifetime. Jongyul could be different now. “You alone tonight?”  
  
He doesn’t even think about the fact that he’s probably being propositioned right now when the man’s tongue flicks out to lick across his lower lip and his brain short-circuits. Because as compromising as he was with the other two in his previous lives, Jongyul and Joonho were never teasing like this, never anything other than blushing and bashful and following his lead.  
  
“Um,” is all he manages, when he remembers he’s been asked a question, and the hands that have been wandering closer to him along the arm of the chair finally land on their target and close around his wrist, tugging him to his feet.  
  
“Come with me,” the man purrs, even as he steadies Kyungsoo by his shoulders when he stumbles into him. He smells like sweat and cheap cologne. “I’ll keep you company, alright?”  
  
He’s pulled through the side door of the club in a whirlwind of motion and swirling colours – his dazed and inebriated brain only catching up with the new development when he sinks into plush cushions, and then something heavy and warm presses down on him. He only realises Jongyul (or whoever he is now) is sitting on his lap when there’s suddenly breath fanning out across his mouth, a face up close to his own.  
  
“You got cash, hun?” he asks now, face tilted down to look at him as he straddles Kyungsoo’s thighs. Up close like this, Kyungsoo can see that his eyeliner is smudged, eyeshadow starting to crease and cascade little glitter-storms down his cheeks.  
  
His throat gloms up from the proximity, the room suddenly too hot, making him out of breath. All he manages is a tight little nod, and the man on his lap smirks in triumph, hands trailing down the lapels of his jacket.  
  
And then that same jacket is being unbuttoned, opened and pushed aside, and Kyungsoo’s mind is swimming because all of a sudden, he’s being undressed by the object of a whole lifetime’s worth of obsession. But he needs to stop –  _Jongyul_  needs to stop – because there’s something important he needs to say and he can’t quite remember it or focus and –  
  
“I know you,” he gasps suddenly, like heaving for air after surfacing from a long dive. And he does feel like he’s drowning.  
  
Jongyul merely hums in acknowledgement as he works on untucking Kyungsoo’s shirt. Busy and uninterested.  
  
Kyungsoo is suddenly extremely frustrated.  
  
“No you don’t understand, I –” he fights for the words before grabbing at Jongyul’s shoulders. He needs to make him  _see_. “ _Jongyul_. Jongyul it’s  _me_.”  
  
But Jongyul doesn’t see. Jongyul just looks vaguely annoyed as he brushes the hands off of his shoulders and looks up.  
  
“I’m not Jongyul.” He enunciates each word slowly. Clearly. Like Kyungsoo is stupid, or something.  
  
And then gets back to work, hands landing to pop the button on Kyungsoo’s fly.  
  
Kyungsoo is  _not_  stupid.  
  
“No you aren’t,” Kyungsoo’s voice is growing more and more desperate, grabbing at the other man again, which makes him stop and stand. “But you  _were_. You  _were_  Jongyul, and I was Byungho, and we were in love! And – and the war, don’t you remember?”  
  
The room is spinning. Jongyul is taking three large steps back from him, eyes wide.  
  
“Listen pal,” he says, and his voice has lost that sweetness. He would sound like Jongyul or Joonho now except there’s something hostile about it all that Kyungsoo isn’t used to. “You need to leave.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s standing now too, lurching forward. He doesn’t know when he gets Jongyul pinned against the wall or why the other man’s mouth is open and there’s so much noise, but he needs to make him understand.  
  
Joonho remembered. Why doesn’t he remember anymore?  
  
He thinks he’s going to be sick when something larger and stronger than him grabs him by both arms and pulls them behind his back. He’s not close to Jongyul anymore and Jongyul’s eyes are still wide, afraid. Light and noise from the main club are leaking into the room, and only now does he realise that the door has opened, that someone’s holding him back.  
  
“You’re crazy,” Jongyul spits.  
  
Kyungsoo’s heart stops.  
  
He throws up all over the floor.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He doesn’t know how many hours have passed when he comes to, dirty concrete biting into his cheek where he lies on the ground, tossed out of the club somewhere nearby. His wallet is missing and this backstreet smells foul, filled with trash and the feeling of hollow emptiness Kyungsoo’s been fighting his whole life to escape.  
  
It’s mechanical how he deals with it all. Getting up and straightening out his clothes, dusting himself up. He doesn’t like taking the subway, but he doesn’t have much choice, so he takes his chances with all the late-night lurkers hanging around the nearest station.  
  
It’s not like he has much on him to steal right now, anyway.  
  
He was so sure about it all. But maybe Joonho was just mistaken in the end. Maybe the universe really  _is_  as anti-climactic as it seems.  
  
Or maybe Joonho wasn’t even real. Maybe  _none_  of it was real, and he’s just projecting all of his delusions, his piteous, unhealthy fantasies onto some poor, insignificant stranger.  
  
Besides. The most important person told him he was crazy.  
  
Kyungsoo sure feels a hell of a lot like he’s crazy right now.  
  
The tell-tale rhythm of a train on the approaching tracks echoes out in the dingy station. Lights flicker from somewhere down the tunnel, and an old woman with no teeth sitting near him starts to gather her things up in preparation for the coming train.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t wait for the doors to open.  
  
In fact, the train hasn’t even started to slow by the time he throws himself onto the tracks in front of it, body sliced and mangled almost instantly. A quick death.  
  
There isn’t much of him left by the time it grinds to a halt.  
  
And hour’s delay on the line the next morning has the Saturday morning passengers a little miffed. But by the afternoon, everything is back to normal.  
  
The city gets on with itself, as always.

 

 


	4. part iv

 

 

In this life, Kyungsoo does not remember.  
  
This time, he is Shin Hyunwoo – or Hyunwoo Shin, like they call him at school, since he was born and raised in London, never having set a foot in Korea himself. He is a promising student and an aspiring writer, working on his own novel in his spare time. He is popular, with many friends and hangers-on that love him, and a large family with three siblings that constantly demand his attention and time.  
  
In this life, he is happy.  
  
But eventually, that cough he’s been nursing for the past three months can no longer be passed off to his mother as ‘just a cold’ and, besides, he’s developing chest pains, and should see a doctor.  
  
So he does.  
  
Countless waiting rooms, scans, and tests later, he finally gets his diagnosis. Stage four lung cancer, they tell him. Surgery is not an option. With radiation and chemotherapy, he might make four years.  
  
Three years is more realistic though. Two. Six months. No one really knows.  
  
His mother cries when he tells her. His sisters and younger brother do too. His father goes white as a sheet, and excuses himself from the room.  
  
He doesn’t tell them about the cigarettes he smoked back in high school. Besides, the doctors had told him he was just unlucky anyway. That this type of cancer is extremely rare in people under forty-five. Even if you  _were_  a chain-smoker, and Kyungsoo was just… experimenting a little, back then.  
  
He goes on with his life.  
  
But it’s as if the diagnosis has opened a floodgate. Because what started out as ‘just a cough’ becomes wheezing and gasping for breath so bad he thinks he might suffocate, has to sleep propped up on four pillows just to drift off without choking to death. Two months later, he looks in the mirror and doesn’t recognise himself – he’s losing weight, losing hair, and there’s a bluish tinge to his skin that’s worrying all of his friends.  
  
His parents want him home. Mention something about a live-in nurse to ‘make things easier’.  
  
By ‘things’ he knows they mean dying, but are just too polite to say it.  
  
It’s only when he starts falling behind in all of his classes that he finally agrees. On the few days that he’s not too tired to get out of bed, the chemo makes him too nauseas to leave his bathroom floor, and he knows he needs to stop being delusional about what he can and can’t do.  
  
Kyungsoo goes home.  
  
To start off with, his friends visit him often, and he’s in and out of the house with lots of free time to spare. He takes his laptop with him to bustling coffee shops to people-watch and work on his novel, and things aren’t too bad.  
  
But the next thing he knows is he’s being rushed to hospital and he’s in so much pain. So much pain that he thinks  _this is it_ , and he must be dying. Right now.  
  
The cancer has spread, they tell him. Gotten itself into his bone tissue. His life expectancy has shortened again, and he should rest as much as possible.  
  
It doesn’t take long for him to struggle so much with walking down the stairs that he stops trying.  
  
Kyungsoo takes all of his meals in his room now.  
  
He doesn’t get out of bed anymore.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**_London, United Kingdom, 2003_**  
  
  
  
His family is being so loud today.  
  
He’s trying to write. That’s all he really wants to do. But all they do is talk and distract him, and he’s never going to get to finish this damn book before he dies, is he?  
  
“Hyunwoo dear,” his mother’s voice is much closer now. In the room with him. He closes his laptop – it’s a lost cause anyway. “We finally managed to find you a nurse.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
He knows they’ve been struggling, and he should be more grateful. Live-in help doesn’t exactly come cheap around here, and when you can’t guarantee they’ll have a job for more than a month, no one’s really going to want to work for you, right?  
  
Kyungsoo shouldn’t have phrased it to his mother like that, he knows. It had made her cry and tell him to stop being so pessimistic, when the doctors said that with proper care he could last another year or two. But it’s hard not to be morbid when you’re dying. It makes you forget that living, healthy people don’t like to hear about all that stuff.  
  
“He’s Korean,” his mother tells him now. “Moved here with his family recently. He struggles a bit with English, so it’s been hard for him to find work. But that’s not a problem for you, right?”  
  
Kyungsoo shakes his head.  
  
“No mum. Of course not.” And then, he reminds himself to stop being a brat, so: “Thank you for finding me someone.”  
  
“Oh, dear, of course I did!” She’s tearing up now. Probably wants to hug him too, but he’s told her not to do that. She always squeezes a little too tight and it doesn’t exactly help with the chest pain. “Anyway, he’s down in the living room now, do you want to meet him today? Or are you too tired?”  
  
Kyungsoo sighs. His sisters are chattering in the next room, and he’s not really going to get any writing done anyway, so he nods. “Sure mum.”  
  
His mother disappears from the room then, and he can hear his parents all the way up the stairs, talking the ear off of this newcomer. He smiles a bit, despite himself. Poor guy doesn’t really know what he’s getting himself into, with this family.  
  
“Hyunwoo meet Donghyun,” his mother announces with a flourish, as a stranger enters the room. “He’ll be taking care of you starting this coming Monday.”  
  
The first thing that Kyungsoo notices about Donghyun is that he’s tall, towering over both of his parents. And then that he’s tan, his skin finished with a healthy glow, and it’s such a nice change to his own, sickly-blue kind of pallor, but the comparison is a little sad.  
  
And then his eyes slide to the other man’s face, and he realises that he is also devastatingly attractive.  
  
Which is a little unfair, he thinks. Because Donghyun’s probably straight as board, and Kyungsoo’s inevitably going to develop a head-over-heels kind of crush on him, and he’s going to be stuck thirsting over a man he can’t have for literally the rest of his life.  
  
Not that that’s a long time, or anything.  
  
“I’ve been excited to meet you ever since I saw your file,” Donghyun says slowly, in heavily accented English, and he smiles now, which is a little dazzling.  
  
Kyungsoo takes a breath to compose himself, and replies in Korean: “Pleased to meet you sunbae.”  
  
They shake hands. The warmth of Donghyun’s skin is a little shocking against his own, since even though they always keep the heating in his room turned up, Kyungsoo is always cold nowadays.  
  
“Hyung is fine,” Donghyun tells him.  
  
The other man has a very warm aura around him. Donghyun makes Kyungsoo feel like he’s genuinely excited to start working for him, like he isn’t ‘just another patient’. Which is a little ridiculous, Kyungsoo thinks, because everyone gets sick of their job eventually. He’s probably just a very good actor, is all.  
  
Before he can respond, however, a coughing fit overtakes him. For a good five minutes, he’s rendered unable to speak, to breath, to move, as he lurches forward and doubles over, hands covering his mouth. By the time it’s over, there’s blood on his fingers, and he lies back, trembling, trying not to get any of it on the sheets.  
  
He’s swimming on the edge of consciousness now, since episodes like this really take it out of him. But he registers someone cleaning up his hands with a damp cloth, dabbing at his face too, and taking his laptop away to put it somewhere else so he can sleep.  
  
“You should go, Donghyun,” he hears his mother say, but it sounds distant, muted and far away. “Hyunwoo needs to rest now. We’ll see you Monday morning.”  
  
The last thing he registers, before he slips away to dream land, is Donghyun’s concerned face looking at him for just a moment longer, before he turns to leave the room, and there are muffled footsteps on the stairs.  
  
Kyungsoo sleeps for a long time. When he wakes up, it’s Sunday morning.  
  
Nightfall can’t come quickly enough.  
  
But maybe Kyungsoo’s just impatient.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He wakes, on Monday, to long, gentle fingers on his forehead, checking his temperature. Eyes flickering open, he’s not prepared to see Donghyun hovering over him so early in the morning, a little too close to his face for him to be entirely comfortable.  
  
“You’re awake,” Donghyun smiles, straightening up, and leaving his personal space bubble. “How do you feel?”  
  
“Fine,” Kyungsoo says, as he shifts to sit up, but his voice cracks from a too-dry throat, and he takes the offered glass of water thankfully as Donghyun props an extra pillow behind his back to keep him comfortable.  
  
“Are you hungry?” he asks now, as Kyungsoo gets his bearings. “Your mother showed me how to make you breakfast before she left, so it’s being kept warm downstairs.”   
  
Kyungsoo’s isn’t hungry. He hasn’t had an appetite for the longest time, and sometimes, he still refuses to eat, since he knows he’s just going to throw it all up, later. But his mother nags about him keeping his strength up, and he knows she’ll probably murder Donghyun for even giving him the choice, so he nods.  
  
“Breakfast would be great.”  
  
He manages to pick through about half of the meal before he decides he’s had enough, and then Donghyun helps him out of bed to go to the bathroom and take his medicine. The whole thing already has him tired enough to need a short nap, and after he wakes for the second time, Donghyun meticulously vacuums the entire room to keep the dust out and away from his irritated lungs.  
  
“Can you bring me my laptop?” Kyungsoo asks once he’s finished, and the noise has died down. His family are all out at work or school, and if Donghyun continues to be as quiet as he has been all morning, Kyungsoo will finally manage to get some writing done.  
  
He writes for a good two hours after that, as Donghyun continues to clean, dusting the ceiling and the curtain rails, and opening the windows to air out the room – but not for too long in case it makes   
Kyungsoo cold. After that he disappears for his own lunch-break, telling Kyungsoo to ring the bell on his side-table should he require assistance while he’s gone.  
  
Kyungsoo’s just taking a break to stretch his tired shoulders and crack his neck when Donghyun reappears.  
  
“What do you do on there?” he asks, conversationally, gesturing to the laptop on Kyungsoo’s thighs as he takes a seat next to the bed. Only now does Kyungsoo register that they’ve been speaking Korean all day.  
  
“I write,” he tells Donghyun. “I was a literature major at varsity, before I had to drop out.”  
  
Donghyun nods.  
  
“What kind of stuff do you write?”  
  
Kyungsoo sighs, tilting his head to the side as he stares at his open and unfinished word document.  
  
“I’m writing a novel, currently. I want to finish it before I die.”   
  
The corners of Donghyun’s mouth pull down. He’s probably new to this all, unused to casual talks about one’s own demise.  
  
“What’s it about?”  
  
Kyungsoo smiles to himself, and feels a little sad.  
  
“It’s about… people,” he starts, struggling to put it all into words. It’s not like his family ever asked. They always just wondered why he couldn’t study towards a ‘proper’ job, become an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor, and Kyungsoo hasn’t had much practice in talking about the things he chose to do with himself instead. “People that grow up, and chase their dreams and fall in love. Start families and grow old together. All that sentimental kind of stuff.”  
  
Donghyun doesn’t say anything. It’s obvious he’s biting his tongue though.  
  
So Kyungsoo says what’s so clearly on his mind for him.  
  
“It’s about all the stuff I’m never going to get to do.” He laughs now. “Guess I’m living vicariously through my characters.”  
  
“Sounds like a good book,” Donghyun says, but he sounds a little sad and now Kyungsoo regrets having said that. Maybe having an audience to talk about his writing isn’t as good a thing as he always thought it would be.  
  
Kyungsoo laughs again.  
  
“It’s a little too ‘utopia’ don’t you think? These days people are looking for drama and sadness and suffering in all their books. I don’t think anyone will read it.”  
  
Donghyun doesn’t laugh.  
  
“I’ll read it,” he says.  
  
Kyungsoo’s already falling too fast.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Donghyun is good at his job.   
  
He’s kind and patient and caring. He never complains about having to rush in on his lunch break to help Kyungsoo stop choking, or waking in the middle of the night to inject Kyungsoo full of morphine when the pain hits again. Kyungsoo’s parents both adore him, and Kyungsoo thinks the younger of his two older sisters might have a bit of a crush on him, because she’s in his room twice as often as she used to be, before Donghyun was around.  
  
And that just makes Kyungsoo feel petty and jealous and stupid. Because his earlier predictions were correct – he’s so hung up on everything Donghyun does, that he might as well admit he’s in love, and be done with it.  
  
And it’s hard not to think Donghyun feels the same sometimes, especially when his smile is so tender, the way he brushes Kyungsoo’s bangs out of his eyes to feel his forehead so achingly gentle that Kyungsoo has come close to kissing him on multiple occasions.  
  
But it’s complicated.  
  
Kyungsoo’s family doesn’t know, for starters, that he’s gay. And they’re home a lot. So, supposing Donghyun  _does_  actually feel the same way about him, and Kyungsoo isn’t just deluding his stir-crazy mind into thinking he has a chance – if they ever actually  _did_  anything (and again, Kyungsoo should stop trying to pretend his body can handle anything more than kissing, which is a whole reason in and of itself why a person might not want him) and his family caught them, it would land Donghyun a one-way ticket out of their front door.  
  
Because while Kyungsoo doesn’t particularly care about the whole gay thing, he knows his  _parents_  will. Since they were, of course, born and raised in Korea themselves, and came to London with a certain modicum of natural conservatism that they never  _did_  quite lose.  
  
So Kyungsoo holds back.  
  
He stops letting himself read into the unnecessary brushes of skin, the way Donghyun seems to light up more than he ever does around anyone else, when he’s alone in the room with just Kyungsoo.   
  
They’re just good friends, Kyungsoo tells himself. Nothing more.  
  
Besides. He’s not cruel enough to inflict the pain of loving a dying man on anyone else. It’s better, for Donghyun’s sake, if he keeps his distance, in that regard.  
  
But despite the denial and smothered feelings, Kyungsoo finds he’s somewhat happy again. Sure, he’s dying, and his clock really  _is_  ticking faster and faster with each passing day, but with Donghyun’s careful care, the doctors say his life expectancy is as good as someone in his position could ever hope for.  
  
And he’s not so goddamn  _bored_  anymore. He doesn’t just waste away in bed in the time between churning out pages for his book, and he actually has someone to  _talk_  to now.  
  
And Donghyun actually  _likes_  to talk to him, it seems. About his book. About anything, really.  
  
“I don’t know how to finish it,” Kyungsoo confesses to him one day. They’ve known each other for about a year now, and Donghyun’s sitting beside the bed, holding his hand like any other day. He does that a lot, and Kyungsoo’s been trying to write it off as ‘Korean skinship’ in his own mind, but he’s not quite sure how successful that’s proving. He’ll get back to it though. Probably. Maybe when Donghyun’s hand stops feeling so warm. “I’ve written so much and worked so hard, but I just don’t know how to finish it, hyung.”  
  
Donghyun is quiet for a moment, a small, enigmatic smile playing over his features. Kyungsoo’s never really noticed how close to the bed he always sits, until now, the other man’s knees bumping uncomfortably against the bedframe when he shifts in his seat.  
  
“Make it a happy ending, okay?” He says after a moment, sounding kind of sad. Kyungsoo doesn’t like it when he uses that tone of voice, because he prefers to see Donghyun smiling. “The world doesn’t have enough of those.”  
  
Kyungsoo smiles too now, but it’s not a happy one. Donghyun’s mood is catching up with him, it seems.  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Hyunwoo…” Donghyun starts, eyes flicking up to meet his so fast it almost looks painful. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry I wasn’t –”  
  
“I know you didn’t. It’s okay.” Kyungsoo cuts him off. He’s silent for a moment. “It’s just hard. I know I’ve accepted it, but there’s so much I wanted to do, you know? What’s  _supposed_  to happen to dreams like that when you get sick? They don’t just go away.”  
  
Donghyun doesn’t answer for the longest time, and when Kyungsoo looks up, there are tears running down his cheeks. It startles him a little, because Donghyun usually manages keeps it all together – has been trained to remain calm and ignore his own emotions in almost every situation – but the first loud sniffle snaps him into action, has him reaching for a tissue from the box on his nightstand to dab away the other’s tears.  
  
“When I die –” Kyungsoo starts, but Donghyun starts shaking his head to cut him off, a fresh wave of tears springing into his eyes. Kyungsoo reaches forward to place both hands on his cheeks, forcing him to still, thumbing across his cheekbones soothingly even as his voice turns firm. “No. Look at me, Donghyun.”  
  
The other opens his eyes reluctantly. They’re reddened and bloodshot, and Kyungsoo hates to see him like this, but this is something he really needs to get out before it’s too late.  
  
“It’s going to happen, hyung. You need to accept it.” Donghyun’s crying harder now, but he nods, and Kyungsoo at least knows he’s listening even if he doesn’t want to. “I need you to promise me something. When I die, please get my book published for me.”  
  
“O…kay?” Donghyun’s voice is nothing more than a croak, and he’s obviously confused. So Kyungsoo elaborates.  
  
“My main dream was always to publish a book, but you know this” Kyungsoo tells him, releasing Donghyun from his hands now and handing him the tissue box instead as he leans back into the pillows. “That’s not going to happen while I’m alive, obviously, but books can be published posthumously, after the author dies.”  
  
Donghyun sniffles and dabs at his eyes, but for the most part, the flow of tears seems to have been staunched. “Wouldn’t your family do that for you though?”  
  
Kyungsoo smiles wryly.  
  
“They never really cared about my writing, hyung. They love me, sure, but my parents always wanted me to do something more… financially secure.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Just,” Kyungsoo pauses, blinking vigorously against the sudden rise of emotion inside of him. Something about Donghyun makes him have regrets, makes him want to  _live_. “Just don’t let my writing die with me, okay?”  
  
Donghyun doesn’t answer.  
  
Instead, Kyungsoo watches as he purses his lips together and glances to the side, visibly upset, and seems to come to a decision.  
  
Then he drops his hand, and lurches forward – out of his seat so fast that the chair scrapes back against the floor with a horrible screech that makes Kyungsoo wince. But when he opens his eyes Donghyun’s right there, eyes conflicted and up close, hands landing to fist in the collar of his shirt, and breath steaming his face for one, long second before he leans down and kisses him.  
  
The tissue box clatters to the floor.  
  
Kyungsoo can’t breathe, and for the first time in this life, that’s a  _good_  thing.  
  
Donghyun kisses him like he’s been wanting to do this for even longer than Kyungsoo has. Like he’s been suffocating, a dying man, and Kyungsoo is the only oxygen in the room. His hands are grabby, rougher than they probably should be as they tug him into the kiss, but Kyungsoo couldn’t bring himself to mind, even if he tried.  
  
Because he knows he shouldn’t, but he’s kissing back, and it’s so,  _so_  good.  
  
Donghyun’s lips are a wildfire against his own, and he can’t quite keep up. Maybe one day, back when he was still healthy, he would be able to give as good as he gets, but right now, he feels that tell-tale tickle up his throat, knows it’s time to slow things down if he doesn’t want to cough up a lung on Donghyun’s lap.  
  
One hand and a small push against Donghyun’s chest has him relinquishing his mouth, but remaining close, foreheads pressed together as he pants to regain his breath. His eyes are closed.  
  
“Don’t –” Kyungsoo pauses to choke back the first of a small series of spluttered coughs. Donghyun’s hands move to rub soothing circles on his back. “Don’t do this to yourself. I’m going to  _die_ , hyung.”   
  
It’s then that Kyungsoo realises that there’s liquid on his hands, but it isn’t blood. It’s clear and salty and it’s everywhere, and Donghyun’s crying again like his world is ending, huge gasps of breath and hiccupped sobs rendering him unable to speak for a whole two minutes.  
  
“Just let me have this,” he begs, whimpering and hysterical. His arms have moved to circle around his body in a hug now, and Kyungsoo probably shouldn’t let him because it  _hurts_ , but he can’t bring himself to push the other man off when he’s like this. “Just let me – even if it’s just for a year – even if we can’t – just –  _please_.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s heaving forward then, his body finally revolting against all of this turmoil he’s putting it through. Donghyun, even through his tears, is as quick as ever to get his bucket in front of him. The sickening churn of his stomach and the bile rising in his throat are the only warnings he gets before he’s throwing up, this morning’s breakfast ending up mangled and vile and wasted before him.  
  
He’s quivering by the time it’s over. His teeth feel grainy and his mouth tastes burnt and acidic, and there’s that awful feeling in his nose and throat of leftover stomach contents that really shouldn’t be there.  
  
“Feel better?” Donghyun asks, waiting for Kyungsoo to nod before he takes the bucket away. He feels a damp cloth dab at his mouth and nose, and a glass of water is pressed into his hand that he drinks from, gratefully.  
  
He falls back into forgiving pillows then, black already swimming around the edges of his vision as his consciousness fades. He feels lips press against his forehead in the softest of kisses, and he fights with his eyelids to stay awake.  
  
“This is not a good idea, hyung,” he says, voice raw and scrapped, as if their earlier conversation had not been interrupted.  
  
“I know,” Donghyun nods, brushing the hair off of Kyungsoo’s sweaty forehead. “I know. But I  _want_  to.”  
  
Donghyun’s skin is so soft, his touches so gentle. The last of Kyungsoo’s hold on both his resolve and his wakefulness slips, and his eyes fall closed.  
  
“Okay,” he murmurs, agreeing despite himself, as he drifts off to sleep.  
  
The light clicks off now. Kyungsoo isn’t awake to see Donghyun stare down at him wistfully, watching the rise and fall of his chest under thick blankets.  
  
“A year is a long time,” Donghyun whispers sadly, to no one.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t hear it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Donghyun doesn’t get his year, in the end.  
  
On his next visit to the doctor, they tell Kyungsoo that the cancer has spread again. His life expectancy has dramatically decreased, and his painkiller dosage skyrockets.  
  
A month later, he is dead.  
  
Donghyun stands with his family at the funeral. He doesn’t tell them the truth. He doesn’t cry.  
  
When they return to the house, he comes with them. Asks for special permission to look through Hyunwoo’s hard drive. Tells them it’s what he would have wanted.  
  
He finds the folder containing Hyunwoo’s book relatively fast, and double clicks to open the word document. The cursor blinks back at him. Almost tauntingly so.  
  
Because, as it turns out, Hyunwoo never did quite get to finish his happy ending. The book is cut-off mid-chapter, suspended on a cliff-hanger.  
  
It will remain that way for the rest of time.

 

 


	5. part v

 

 

In this life, Kyungsoo is finally Kyungsoo.  
  
And little by little, he remembers again.  
  
The memories are clearer this time around, and by the age of growing out of childhood make-believe, he’s remembered what happened to Byungchul, in the end. He remembers what destroyed him – and now he knows it’s not a good idea to talk about the people and places and happenings in his mind with others. Especially not parents and teachers and authority figures.  
  
Especially not…  _anyone_ , really.  
  
So he learns to be thoughtful. To think before he speaks. And thus, Kyungsoo grows up a somewhat pensive child.  
  
In this life he’s a little shorter than he remembers from before. His eyesight a little weaker. And also – his voice is stronger. Deeper. Smooth and clear. By primary school he’s already known as ‘that kid who can really sing’, and his parents encourage him to pursue the talent.  
  
He likes it, he realises. He likes singing a lot.  
  
For the first time in any of his lives, he has a dream – and a real chance of achieving it. A clear-cut goal he really,  _really_  wants to pursue. For once, he isn’t just drifting – clawing through one day only to start the next with the same sense of disillusionment, and it really is quite refreshing.  
  
So by the time high school rolls around, he puts away his memories. He takes Jongyul and Joonho and Donghyun, and packs them into a neat little box, that he pushes away to the back of his mind.  
  
Besides. They always seem to meet under the worst of circumstances. Bad things happen when they’re together. Perhaps they’re not meant to be – perhaps, if the universe ever  _was_  trying to send him a sign, it’s that Jongyul was a  _bad_  omen all along, and not the soulmate he originally assumed.  
  
Maybe he doesn’t want all that anymore anyway. Maybe he just wants to  _live_  for once.  
  
He’s busy now. With school and vocal lessons. He doesn’t have time to think about his past lives, except on those long nights when he can’t sleep. And even then he develops some tricks – little things that get him tired before bedtime, and, when all else fails, he complains to his parents about insomnia, and gets a prescription for some sleeping pills.  
  
He’s all but forgotten, by the time they meet again.  
  
SM Entertainment is a big company, and his parents had been proud upon his success at the audition. On his first day being shown around, another boy – around his age, but maybe a bit younger – catches his eye.  
  
He’s practicing a dance routine with another trainee, the door wide open, as Kyungsoo and his guide walk past, so they take a little peek in.  
  
And by the time his guide is walking away, Kyungsoo has to tear himself from the doorframe, because those sleepy eyes and plush lips belong to someone he would recognise anywhere.  
  
He hardly takes in the rest of the tour because his mind is too busy screaming at him. Warnings and profanities and all sorts of unprintable things, because he’s already decided he’s not doing this all again.  
  
But if he gets too close, will he be able to resist?  
  
And that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?  
  
Perhaps he’ll get lucky, Kyungsoo thinks, on the train home. Perhaps they won’t end up in the same group, perhaps they’ll only end up catching sight of each other once or twice at awards shows, perhaps he’ll only be subjected to the occasional smile and polite bow.  
  
Perhaps he won’t have to go through everything all over again.  
  
The chances are low, right?  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**_Seoul, South Korea, 2011_**  
  
  
  
Kyungsoo is in a bad mood.  
  
“Hey, Kyungsoo-ssi,” Junmyeon, another trainee he’s been getting to know lately, calls out to him. “We’re going out for dinner. Want to join?”  
  
_Food would be nice_ , he thinks. He’s about to call back and say yes, when he catches sight of another presence just behind Junmyeon, fidgeting.   
  
He scowls without realising it.  
  
The other boy seems to whisper something to Junmyeon, who in turn, whispers something back. Kyungsoo watches them have a mini argument right on the spot in front of him, but he doesn’t know what they’re saying.  
  
“It’d be good for us to start getting to know each other a little better, right?” Junmyeon asks now, a tad too pointed to be casual, and write off the little tiff as about anything other than Kyungsoo. “We’re gonna be living together soon, you know.”  
  
Kyungsoo sighs once, then nods.  
  
“Yeah sure. Alright.”  
  
Jongin agrees too, continuing to fidget. He avoids eye contact with both of them.  
  
And there it is. The cause of his bad mood.  
  
They’ve just found out they’ll be debuting soon – in just over a years’ time. Kyungsoo should be ecstatic, and deep down, he knows that some part of him probably is. But it’s just  _who_  he’s been sorted with that’s put a bit of a damper on his mood, because he’s tried so hard to stay out of trouble during his pre-debut years. But trouble, it seems, always has a way to find him, and he really can’t quite catch a break.  
  
In this life, trouble comes wrapped up in tan skin, puffy eyes, and an annoyingly endearing pout. In this life, trouble is named Kim Jongin, and he’s been put into the same band as Kyungsoo, it turns out.  
  
Kyungsoo falls into step with the other two now, and tries not to pay too much attention to the presence beside him.  _Jongin_. He likes that name.  
  
But Kyungsoo’s had to pick it up in passing conversations with his other bandmates, because it’s not like the younger boy has expressly introduced himself to Kyungsoo at any point in time.  
  
On the contrary. Jongin has done his level best to  _avoid_  Kyungsoo as much as possible, and it’s getting to the point where even a couple of the others are starting to notice, and ask if something’s up between them. Which is fine with Kyungsoo – suits his plans perfectly, in fact – but he can’t help the small, buried part of him that hurts. He knows he shouldn’t mind, but there’s still so much of him that aches for the Jongin of all his past lives, that craves his touch and affection and so much more.  
  
He has to consciously remind himself that  _this_  Jongin isn’t the same one he loved before.  
  
And that  _this_  Jongin wants nothing to do with him.  
  
For a moment, he’d even entertained the notion that maybe, Jongin remembered too. Maybe that’s why he’s avoiding Kyungsoo – for exactly the same reason Kyungsoo’s avoiding him.  
  
But he’d dismissed that line of thought pretty soon. After all, Jongin never remembers. And that’s just the whole problem here, isn’t it? That’s exactly what’s  _been_  the problem since day one.  
  
Jongin never fucking remembers him.  
  
Kyungsoo’s been pining after a man who can’t even remember his own lover. And maybe, just maybe, Kyungsoo’s a little over that.  
  
They bustle into Junmyeon’s restaurant-of-choice now, and by the luck of the draw, Jongin is shouldered into the booth-style seating next to him, trapped between Kyungsoo and Baekhyun, when the oldest of the three climbs in after. Jongin draws his shoulders close, his knees together, and Kyungsoo can practically  _see_  the amount of mental energy he’s expending not to touch him. He’s curled in on himself protectively, secured in his little personal space bubble, a furry face and a back full of spines the only things he lacks to complete the mental image of a disgruntled hedgehog.  
  
Kyungsoo sighs again to himself, softly. It’s frustrating, seeing Jongin react to him like this.  
  
But also for the best, he realises, so he lets it slide.  
  
Chanyeol’s taken the seat across from him now, but Kyungsoo’s too in his own head to notice the booming presence right in front of him until a loud shout of “Kyungsoo!” snaps his head up, eyes going wide as he’s startled out of his own thoughts.  
  
Chanyeol grins like he’s done something worthy of praise when Kyungsoo looks up.  
  
He rolls his eyes and scowls in response. It’s just like Chanyeol, Kyungsoo thinks, to startle him on purpose, and with no real reason to do so in the first place.  
  
“You were frowning so seriously, Soo,” Chanyeol’s laughing at him now, but it’s good natured. Kyungsoo kind of likes the oaf even if he’ll never admit it out loud. “Why the face?”   
  
“I forgot my glasses again,” he grumbles, tempted to flip the other off. Goddamn Chanyeol  _knows_  why he frowns all the time, he’s just doing it to tease, and Kyungsoo doesn’t know if he appreciates that right now. “You  _know_  I can’t see properly.”  
  
“Yeah but you look like you’re gonna kill us all,” Chanyeol snorts, laughing like that joke is still funny, and not tired and overused by now. Kyungsoo rolls his eyes again and kicks him under the table, making Chanyeol yelp over-dramatically in pain, and claim Kyungsoo has ‘maimed him for life’.  
  
Chanyeol’s laughter has faded, however, his attention caught by another conversation completely, when Kyungsoo feels a soft touch to his forearm a moment later, and he turns, a little surprised to see Jongin blinking timidly down at him, eyes questioning.  
  
“Is that really why you glare so much?” Jongin asks shyly, obviously referring to Chanyeol’s earlier teasing. “Because of your eyesight?”  
  
Kyungsoo is – both thankfully and amazingly – not too dazzled by the sight and presence of Jongin up close, to answer the question without making himself look like a total half-wit.   
  
“Yeah,” he starts, trailing off a little lamely. And then, after a pause that lasts too long for the conversation not to feel stilted and awkward: “I have an astigmatism. People say it makes me look scary.”  
  
Jongin outright  _blushes_  now, and Kyungsoo can’t even begin to understand the connection as the other opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it again, clearly embarrassed.  
  
“I thought you hated me!” He suddenly blurts, and then covers his mouth with two hands, eyes wide with mortification. “I mean, um, you – you always glared and I thought you were angry. I thought maybe you didn’t like me for some reason. You know how petty trainees can be.”  
  
Luckily for Jongin and his reddened face, their conversation goes mostly ignored by the rest of the table, who chatter loudly around them about practice and what it’s going to be like when they debut. And luckily for Kyungsoo, they’re completely oblivious to the little rapture he goes through when Jongin withdraws his hands from his face, and pouts cutely as he says: “I’m sorry if I ever came off as rude or cold, hyung. I didn’t know –”  
  
“It’s okay,” Kyungsoo smiles warmly, cutting the other’s babbling off when he finally gets his mouth in working order. “It’s really my fault for forgetting my glasses so much.”  
  
And then the unthinkable happens.  
  
Jongin  _smiles_.  
  
And Kyungsoo is a goddamn fool. Not because he’s falling again – that’s inevitable, falling for Jongin is inevitable. But rather because he falls so  _fast_. Because he’s only thirty seconds into the realisation that Jongin doesn’t, in fact, hate him, and his resolve to keep his distance is already crumbling away at an alarming rate.  
  
It unfurls slowly, timid, the corners of Jongin’s mouth curling up like the delicate petals of a flower reaching towards the morning sun. Kyungsoo is absolutely enthralled, and he has to remind himself, momentarily, that in this life, those plush lips are not his to claim with kisses as he likes, that his hands have no right to land on Jongin’s hips or waist, and tug him closer.  
  
Kyungsoo swallows.  
  
“You probably know by now,” Jongin says, and Kyungsoo hangs on his every word, drinks in every quiet syllable. “But I never properly introduced myself before, so my name’s Jongin.”  
  
And his plans are ruined, he realises. Because there’s no way he’s going to be able to keep himself from Jongin, or even focus on  _anything_  else if they’re together, with those sweet smiles, and the way his eyes crinkle up at the corners, and age him back five years.  
  
“Kyungsoo,” he replies, and Jongin nods. He’s shifted out of his protective cocoon now, his thigh brushing up against Kyungsoo’s on the squashed booth seat, and their shoulders knocking together between them.  
  
It’s time for Plan B.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Plan B, as it turns out, is frustrating as hell.  
  
Plan B involves a lot of lying about his feelings. Plan B involves too much of him trying not to read into touches that could, realistically, and in all likelihood, be just platonic. Plan B involves being ‘just friends’, and if Kyungsoo were perfectly, candidly honest with Jongin, it’s eating him alive.  
  
But Plan B also happens to involve a lot of dishonesty when it comes to Jongin and the nature of their relationship, and he’s never going to let so much as a word of it all slip.  
  
Besides, in this life, Jongin is young.  
  
They’ve never met so young before, in fact. And even if Kyungsoo could convince Jongin to be his under these circumstances, would he stay? Wouldn’t the one-sided promise of forever be a little much for seventeen-year-old Jongin, with his skinny limbs, and his boyish laugh, and the other band members joking that mentally, his real age must be about twelve?  
  
And the thought of Jongin leaving him in this lifetime is a special kind of torture, one that he saves for nights of self-loathing when he can’t stop replaying the slivers of golden stomach that show on stage whenever Jongin really gets into his dancing. Those thoughts he’s been trying to shove as far away from himself as possible – those ones about Jongin’s hands on him, those ones about his mouth on him, those ones about all the things Kyungsoo’s not supposed to think about if he wants anything in his life to go smoothly for once.  
  
But it’s hard. Especially when the company decides Jongin’s natural charisma while performing makes him ‘the sexy member’, and the co-ordi noonas start dressing him in low cut shirts on purpose.  
  
And then in between everything, Jongin comes pouting to him about nightmares and missing home, and he’s just a kid, really. Which just makes Kyungsoo feel even  _more_  guilty. About everything.  
  
They’ve debuted now. Kyungsoo hardly notices the fans or the cameras, or his name suddenly everywhere on those online gossip sites. Because in between crazy schedules and too little sleep, his mind is attuned to one dongsaeng in particular – the only person he finds he’ll make time for regardless of how exhausted he himself is. He misses his own mother’s calls on the regular, but Jongin need only pout in that sleepy way of his and Kyungsoo will give him whatever he wants – food, companionship, cuddles. Anything.  
  
That’s the other thing though. Jongin  _likes_  cuddling with him.  
  
It started with movie nights in their dorms – curled up on one of their beds with a bowl of popcorn and the lights dimmed as they perched a laptop on a pillow to see better. It had been awkward at first – knees bumping with too little space on a single bed for both of them to fit – before Jongin had wrapped an arm around his shoulder, drawing him closer, and telling him it wasn’t a big deal if they cuddled, just a little.  
  
It ended up with Jongin snuggled into his chest, the back of his head cradled into the curve of Kyungsoo’s neck as he snores peacefully, having drifted off some time ago. It tickles a little, and by the time the movie has run its course and Jongin has woken up, Kyungsoo finds he can’t remember a single scene.  
  
Jongin likes touching him in general though, it seems.  
  
There’s little brushes of his hand in the mornings, when Jongin hasn’t quite woken up because he refuses coffee. Touches that would seem simple to anyone else, but make Kyungsoo’s whole body burn with the way he thinks about it for the rest of the day.  
  
There’s the way Jongin leans on him when they’re sitting next to each other, or when they’re standing around at the airport and he’s sleepy. There’s the way Jongin hugs him sometimes – so warm and tight, and like he never wants to let go – and the way Jongin will happily sit on his lap if there are no other seats available (and sometimes even if there are), despite the size difference.  
  
And sometimes, when it’s late or very early, when Jongin is tired or upset, and he’s in his rawest emotional state, those touches verge on too intimate. Simple touches of the hand turn into lingering trails of fingertips up his arm. Eyes that follow him around the room with that strangely tortured look long after he’s touched Kyungsoo’s temple, his lips, the bridge of his nose…  
  
Eventually, Kyungsoo can no longer delude himself into thinking this is something friends normally do. Sure, the other members do a lot of the same stuff just to rile up the fans, but no matter how he looks at it, nothing about the way Jongin interacts with him is staged. Jongin is never anything but purely, unadulteratedly genuine, and that’s all starting to eat him alive too.  
  
But there are other things. Darker things. That little look of fear that flashes through Jongin’s eyes every now and again that makes Kyungsoo reluctant, makes him hold back.  
  
He’d seen it when Chanyeol had – flippantly and stupidly – made some homophobic joke in passing one day. The TV had been on, and some foreign show which included a gay couple had been playing. No one was really watching, and Chanyeol probably didn’t even mean it, was probably just trying to be funny, but Kyungsoo had seen the way Jongin’s whole face had clouded over with something unpleasant. He’d understood that when Jongin excused himself to bed five minutes later, it wasn’t  _just_  because he was tired.  
  
Or there was that other time – that time Jongin had walked in on Kyungsoo in the kitchen late at night, fetching himself a glass of water. He’d mindlessly latched himself around Kyungsoo’s shoulder blades, the way he normally does when they’re alone, and neither of them had thought much of it until Sehun had walked in looking for a snack and told them both to ‘get a room’.  
  
Jongin was not happy. He didn’t tell Kyungsoo as much though, and merely sulked off back to his bedroom, alone.  
  
And yet another time – back when they were all still new to this, and their growing fandom had been a new and novel thing, a couple of members had come across a fan fiction. It was about Chanyeol and Baekhyun, and it was totally out of character, and Jongdae had decided it was a good idea to read sections of it out loud for everyone in the living room to hear, much to the amusement of Chanyeol and Baekhyun themselves, who had dissolved into a pile of laughter and breathlessness on the couch together.  
  
But Jongin, it seems, was not as amused. And Kyungsoo saw, for a moment, that he was visibly upset. That the next time someone looked at him to share in the joke, his smile was forced and faked, but the other members were all having too much fun to notice at the time.  
  
Jongin changes then. It takes a little while, but soon, he’s the first member to make fun of the others’ skinship, the first member to make snide remarks whenever homosexuality comes up in conversation. Kyungsoo knows he’s probably just scared, but hearing Jongin talk about his ‘future wife’ in all of their interviews, knowing how he’s latched onto the idea like this –  
  
He can’t help but let his heart break, just a little.  
  
Jongin stops touching him so much in public, too. They’re still relatively close, but it’s only when they’re back at the dorms, away from the cameras and public and other members’ eyes, that he burrows into Kyungsoo’s neck and clings to him, like he always used to.  
  
They’re not even together, but Kyungsoo feels like some dirty secret now. He’s  _seen_  the way Jongin hesitates to hold his hand on stage sometimes, and it hurts.  
  
He wants to be angry, but, realistically, when it really comes down to it, Jongin owes him nothing. Not even an explanation.  
  
It’s then that Plan B stops working, and Kyungsoo decides to let Jongin go.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Plan C involves a lot of distancing himself. A lot of  _‘not now Jongin I’m busy’_ s and  _‘I’m sorry Jongin, I’m too tired right now’_ s. It involves a lot of ignoring the younger man – even when that’s the very  _last_  thing he wants to do – and the way the Jongin looks so disappointed every time he turns him down has his heart sinking on the regular, makes him want to change his mind and gather Jongin close, tell him everything’s okay between them.  
  
Except it really isn’t. And he needs a more concrete excuse before Jongin comes looking for answers.  
  
So he takes up acting.  
  
The company’s been asking for a while now whether he’s interested, and honestly – why not? It seems fun, even if he has no experience, and Jongin’s taken to subjecting him to long bouts of suffocating silence recently. He just really needs to get out and away.  
  
He gets minor roles at first. But the praise comes, suddenly and out of no where, and before he knows it he’s got more offers than he can handle, and all the gossip websites are making up rumours that he’s leaving exo to become an actor now.  
  
It works though, because in between his exo activities and the roles he finds the time to take on, he’s left with very little time in between to waste pining over Jongin. Even then, he’s rich enough now to buy his own car and find his own apartment, so he’s subjected to less and less of his every move around the dorms being watched by a pair of wide, longing eyes.  
  
Wide, longing eyes that he knows he can’t have. This is for Jongin’s good as much as it is his own.  
  
Kyungsoo does that thing again. He does that thing where he takes all his memories, and all the feelings swirling around inside of him, and he shoves them away to the back of his mind.  
  
Except this time, when he puts the lid on that box, he hopes to keep it closed forever.  
  
He wants nothing to do with all that anymore.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
But, as expected, life doesn’t really end up going according to plan.  
  
Because like it or not, he still does spend a good portion of his time at the exo dorms, for convenience if nothing else. And Jongin lives there too, a lot of the time, when he isn’t home with his family. So he can’t exactly avoid the younger forever, and one winter’s day, when he’s stomping his feet from the cold on the way into the dorms, he ends up alone with Jongin, in the bedroom they share with Chanyeol.  
  
The other is lying on his own bed, doing something with his phone. Upon Kyungsoo’s entrance he looks up, only to drop his eyes back down to his comforter quickly.  
  
“Hi hyung.”  
  
Kyungsoo can’t read the look on his face  
  
“Hey,” he replies, after a moment. He’d been planning to hang out here for a while, but now he thinks he’ll just grab a change of clothes and go, seeing as Jongin’s here already.  
  
“You going somewhere?” Jongin asks now, as Kyungsoo shoves a pair of sweatpants into his backpack. Kyungsoo glances back over his shoulder to look at him for a moment, curiously. This is the most they’ve spoken in over a month.  
  
“Yeah, I’m…,” he pauses here, searching for an excuse. “Busy.”  
  
The word feels comfortable and well-worn in his mouth. Like he’s said it a tad too often, palmed Jongin off with the same lies over and over again, without fail.  
  
And he has.  
  
Jongin knows it too.  
  
“You’re always busy, hyung,” he says now, smiling a little ruefully. “Can’t you stay for a while? I feel like we never see each other anymore.”  
  
Kyungsoo turns now to look at the other man, to let that wistful, longing note in Jongin’s voice wash over him. He knows he’s not supposed to want this, but he can’t help but be a little selfish, every now and again.  
  
“Please?” Jongin adds, when Kyungsoo doesn’t immediately reply, and Kyungsoo’s never been good at refusing Jongin anything. Not in any of his past lives, and certainly not now, even if he’s had to before.  
  
He gives in, just this once.   
  
“I guess I could hang out for a while,” he says, voice sounding weak and distant to his own ears. “What do you want to do?”  
  
Jongin seems to perk up at that, shifting over on his bed and patting the space beside him.  
  
“We could watch a movie? Like old times?” There’s still that vague forlornness in his voice that makes Kyungsoo want to cup his cheeks and comfort him.  
  
But a movie? Together on Jongin’s bed, “like old times”? Cuddled up like they don’t both know that’s a bad idea? That’s –  
  
“Alright,” Kyungsoo nods, cutting off the direction of his own thoughts before they manifest into a visible blush. “That’s fine.”  
  
It’s not like old times. They don’t cuddle, merely sit quite close together, and because of that, Kyungsoo can feel Jongin tense beside him. Neither do they joke about how over-the-top the explosions in the action movie they’ve chosen are, or laugh at all of the cheesy jokes.  
  
Kyungsoo isn’t watching the movie anyway.  
  
Instead, he’s quietly suffocating, pretending that his whole being isn’t attuned to the person sitting next to him, the way he shifts, the way he breathes, the way he reaches forward to pause the movie and –  
  
Wait, what?  
  
Kyungsoo had been so caught up in every slight movement Jongin made, he hadn’t been quite thinking about what it all meant. And now the other’s closed the laptop and turned to face him, and it doesn’t look good.  
  
“You’ve been avoiding me, hyung.”  
  
Jongin is upset. Visibly and audibly.   
  
Kyungsoo isn’t ready for this confrontation.  
  
“I’m not avoiding you, Jongin.” He tries for denial first, in his best soothing voice. He’s not an actor for nothing, it turns out. “I’ve just been really busy with the movie lately and –”  
  
“I’m not stupid!” Jongin’s voice rises and wavers. Any more of this and he’ll probably start crying. “You find time to hang out with Chanyeol hyung and Baekhyun hyung and Sehun all the time!”  
  
“That was –” Kyungsoo tries to interject, but it seems Jongin is on a roll now, because he’s cut off almost immediately.  
  
“Do you not want to be my friend anymore?” He asks, voice going horribly thin as his eyes brim with tears. “Just tell me hyung. What’s going on with us?”  
  
“I –” Kyungsoo starts only to stop. This whole thing – staying here with Jongin – was a mistake, he realises.  
  
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Jongin asks, suddenly, and Kyungsoo stops breathing.  
  
Because… is Jongin for real?  
  
This whole time, could he really not  _see_  how head over heels Kyungsoo was for him? He’d thought, if anything, Jongin  _knew_  how he felt, and was just scared of what that kind of attraction entailed in their part of society.  
  
“No,” he chokes out. “ _God_  no. Jongin –”  
  
“Boyfriend?” he asks now, softer. Kyungsoo’s heart skips a beat.  
  
“What?”  
  
Nothing really makes sense anymore.  
  
“I’m asking if you have a boyfriend hyung,” Jongin just looks terribly, terribly sad, and suddenly every little memory that Kyungsoo’s so tightly locked away, every feeling he’s held back for so long, comes gushing out around him in one huge, unbearable tidal wave. “There must be something you’re not telling me about.”  
  
And it’s stupid, because even if Kyungsoo  _did_  have a boyfriend, it wouldn’t be any of Jongin’s business.  
  
But god  _damn_  it, all Kyungsoo knows is that he sure as hell  _wants_  it to be Jongin’s business.  
  
And Kyungsoo’s done the maths before. He might not have remembered for all of that time, but Kyungsoo’s been pining after Jongin in all of these different lifetimes for about seventy years now, give or take.  
  
And seventy years is a long ass time for someone who’s only twenty-two years old and at his wits end about what to do with someone he’s now stopped denying is the love of his life. Of all his lives.  
  
So Kyungsoo does the only thing he  _can_  do under the given circumstances.  
  
He kisses him.  
  
Jongin had been about to say something, but all of a sudden Kyungsoo’s face to face with him, and the words die with a muffled little yelp into the first push of lips against his own. And Kyungsoo’s got a handful of each of Jongin’s wrists in his palms, feeling the other struggle, feebly, and for only a second, before he stills in his binds, and surrenders to the kiss.  
  
Except then he’s kissing back, fierce and fiery, and something warm drops down low in Kyungsoo’s stomach as he’s granted entrance into a hot, slick mouth, as he traces the back of Jongin’s teeth with his tongue, feels their noses brush. Jongin whines, high and loud and raw, and Kyungsoo only realises now that he’s moved to pin other flat on his back against the pillows.  
  
And when did he swing a leg over and straddle Jongin? When did Jongin start squirming against him, restless and turned on and hard? Is now the right time? Did they lock the door? How long until the members come home?  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t have an answer to his many questions. But his mind whites out when Jongin rolls his hips up and into him, with all the skill of the dancer he is, and Kyungsoo outright  _growls_.  
  
In the next moment he’s unbearably hard, and Jongin is pliant and soft and passionate beneath him. He wants nothing more than to touch Jongin, to feel him, and memories of Jongyul bouncing on his lap, and of Joonho, down on his knees, crowd at the edges of his mind, remind him he’s been here before.  
  
But then: Jongin is not Jongyul. Jongin is not Joonho.  
  
Jongin is not a memory. He’s real and tangible and right in front of him, and that feeling in and of itself is amazing. And Jongin is too good, too quaveringly beautiful for him to pass up this opportunity. Even if he has his doubts about how they’ll both feel about this tomorrow, he just isn’t strong enough to say no to something like this.  
  
“Is this okay?” Kyungsoo draws back now to stare down at Jongin, flushed cheeks and cherry-kissed lips alluring. Jongin’s eyes open softly, slowly, with a flutter of dark lashes and then –  
  
Then the wrists in Kyungsoo’s hands are ripping out of his fingers, only to plant firmly against his chest and shove him off.  
  
By the time Kyungsoo even realises what’s happened, Jongin is on his feet. Eyes wide, he turns to Kyungsoo, looking like a deer caught in the headlights as he shifts his weight from foot to foot, horribly awkward as he stands there.  
  
And Jongin looks absolutely  _terrified_  when they finally make eye contact.  
  
“Hyung,” he breathes, voice nothing more than a cracked whisper. He’s wringing his hands together too. “We  _can’t._ ”  
  
A moment longer is all Jongin stays, before he darts from the room, and Kyungsoo hears the lock on the bathroom door click shut. Kyungsoo stares, motionless, at the empty spot where the other once stood.  
  
Minutes later, Jongin hasn’t come back. Kyungsoo lies back down and groans, frustrated.  
  
So. Another plan gets ruined. And Jongin rejects him in the end anyway. Great.  
  
But more pressing is the fact that he might have just fucked everything up between them.  
  
And he just doesn’t know how he’s going to face Jongin tomorrow.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
After Plan C, there are no more plans.  
  
He doesn’t even know where to  _start_  to fix this whole mess with Jongin. There are layers upon layers of complications, and the biggest issue he finds, is that it feels like his heart has been stepped on, and his feelings trampled into the dirt. Even if there isn’t really any way the younger could know quite the depth of what Kyungsoo feels for him, nothing protects him from the emotional whiplash that comes with being rejected by someone he’s truly, truly in love with.  
  
Oh, and also Jongin’s avoiding him now. There’s that too.  
  
It seems Kyungsoo was a good teacher in the art of evasion, because Jongin pulls all the same tactics. He’s got his own apartment now, and he’s off, god knows where all the time. Kyungsoo doesn’t think it’s his place to ask, and even if it was, he doesn’t really want to know.  
  
Everything just hurts.  
  
He wonders for how long this will all go on for. For how many lives will he and Jongin have to be unhappy together? How long will the universe subject them to this torture? When will any of it start making some semblance of sense? When will any of it stop hurting?  
  
He doesn’t want to see Jongin’s eyes flit away when they accidentally make eye contact across the practice room anymore. On his darker nights, his mind conjures up self-deprecating jokes about how he’d probably end it all, if that wouldn’t just start the whole cycle anew.  
  
And no one gives him a break, really. In his opinion, emotionally, he’s earned the right to sit in the corner and cry for a good couple of days. But now they have a comeback to prepare for, and schedules to attend, and Kyungsoo has to soldier through with his forever-polite attitude. Even though most of the time, he kind of wants to tell everyone to fuck off, and roll back under the covers for a long nap.  
  
All in all, he’s exhausted, heartbroken, and sick of everything. He just wants it to stop.  
  
But those problems pale in contrast to when, two months later, Jongin gets a girlfriend.  
  
The asshole doesn’t even tell Kyungsoo himself. He lets him hear about it through Chanyeol, who grins through the whole conversation, remaining blissfully oblivious to the way Kyungsoo’s world tilts a little on its axis.  
  
Now he doesn’t want to cry anymore. He wants to scream.  
  
And maybe punch Jongin in the face.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s late on a week night, about a month later, when Kyungsoo’s startled out of that quiet kind of detachment he always slips into when he has a moment alone, by a knock on the door.  
  
It’s Jongin, of course. Only Jongin would be fucking stupid enough to knock on the door to his  _own damn bedroom_.  
  
Although, in his defence, Kyungsoo guesses, it’s not like either of them live here much, anymore. But back to the point at hand – Jongin’s here now. And Kyungsoo’s here too. But Kyungsoo had only been here in the first place because Jongin  _wasn’t_ , and now that he is, his whole sulk-and-avoid strategy’s been compromised.  
  
He scowls.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Can we talk?”  
  
Jongin sounds, quite frankly, extremely afraid. But Kyungsoo’s too petty to have any pity for him right now, and doesn’t even look at him when he next speaks.  
  
“If we have to.” He purses his lips. Jongin rocks on the balls of his feet.  
  
Or maybe Kyungsoo’s not that petty, really. Maybe acting like this is the reasonable reaction to seventy years’ worth of longing and built up tension, peaking to a crescendo, only to terminate in –  
  
Absolutely nothing.  
  
Maybe this is just what happens when you’ve been in love with someone for seventy years, and they don’t fucking love you back.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t know. It sure  _feels_  reasonable, to him.  
  
“I’m,” Jongin’s voice is quiet, his eyes downcast. “Dating Soojung now.”  
  
Kyungsoo feels the cracks in his very soul grow just that much deeper.  
  
“I know.”  
  
The younger sucks his bottom lip in between his teeth and bites down on it. When he releases, it’s reddened and slicked and swollen, and  _god_ , it’s just so unfair. Because despite everything, Kyungsoo still wants to be the one that gets to do that biting, still wants to be the one that gets to have Jongin’s lips, all bitten and plump like that, to himself.  
  
“She’s nice,” Jongin continues, and fuck, but Kyungsoo thinks he really  _will_  punch him if he keeps going. “We had that photoshoot earlier this year, and we – we really hit it off.”  
  
_Wow_ , Kyungsoo thinks.  
  
Because apparently, for Jongin, it’s not enough to just break Kyungsoo’s heart. He has to come along and taunt him with the details of his new relationship too. Just to rub it in.  
  
He’s had enough, he realises.  
  
“Get out, Jongin.”  
  
“Hyung, I –” Jongin starts and then stops. There are tears on his face, but Kyungsoo doesn’t think  _he’s_  the one with the reason to cry.   
  
He sighs. Has he ever really felt this tired before?  
  
“If you won’t leave, I will,” Kyungsoo says now, face blank as he unfolds his legs and gets up. He’s quick to grab his backpack, and start shoving his things in mindlessly.  
  
Abruptly, there are hands on him, trying to make him stop. He shoves Jongin off so hard he ends up sinking onto the other bed, knees buckling beneath him, as he cries into his hands harder.  
  
“Stop it hyung I’m –” He sobs now: an awful, heart-wrenching sound. But Kyungsoo’s just about reached the limit of his sympathy. “I’m trying to tell you about my relationship.” Another sob. “That’s what friends do. They tell each other stuff.”  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t even bother to point out the irony of him saying that, when Jongin’s only telling him about Soojung  _now_ , a month later, and last out of everyone. Instead, he just stops what he’s doing, and pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He can hear the members in the living room, and if he’s going to leave, he  _really_  doesn’t want to have to cry first.  
  
They’d ask questions. And Kyungsoo doesn’t have any fucking answers to anyone’s fucking questions right now.  
  
“I am not your friend, Jongin,” Kyungsoo grits out from behind clenched teeth. “I don’t know what the  _hell_  we are, but we are  _not_  friends. You know how I feel.”  
  
And then Jongin’s up, springing earnestly into his personal space again. “No I don’t hyung! Kyungsoo, I have no  _idea_  how you feel, when you never tell me anything.”  
  
It’s giving him a headache.  
  
Kyungsoo slaps the hands on his arm away so he can sling his backpack up onto his shoulder. But that just makes Jongin more persistent, like one of those annoying mosquitoes that keeps you up at night, but you can never quite manage to kill.  
  
“Hyung!” He reprimands, panicky, trying to block his path towards the door now. “Hyung won’t you just  _talk_  to me about this –”  
  
“I love you,” Kyungsoo suddenly blurts, drawing himself up short, and to a standstill. It’s out of nowhere and without permission, like he can’t quite help it or something. Like every moment of this pathetic little lovesick life of his has led up to this one stupid, misguided confession, only for him to be rejected. “Jongin I’m  _in_  love with you. Can’t you see?”  
  
And maybe it has.   
  
Jongin goes completely still, and completely silent. When Kyungsoo dares to look up at him, Jongin is wider-eyed than he’s ever seen him, one hand covering the lower half of his face in shocked horror.  
  
Kyungsoo’s really done it now.  
  
“Hyung. No,” he starts, eyelashes fluttering into life, and he looks stricken. “Hyung it’s not like that.  _We’re_  not like that.”  
  
Straight denial. Kyungsoo would almost be impressed, if he weren’t so miserable.  
  
But Kyungsoo doesn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with this anymore.  
  
“Believe what you want,” he says, trying not to let Jongin hear that he’s choking up as he brushes past on his way to the door. This time, Jongin doesn’t stop him.  
  
“Hyung you don’t. You  _don’t_.” Kyungsoo can almost see him shaking his head from the way his voice shakes, balancing it’s notes on treacherous ground, despite the fact that he doesn’t turn his head. “You don’t love me, hyung.”  
  
It’s the last thing he hears before he slips out of the door.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t turn around.

 

 


	6. part vi

 

 

 _In this life, Jongin is born into a loving family._  
  
His name is Bae Jongyul, and he is happy. He grows up abroad, and studies to become a psychiatrist, to pursue his dream of helping people. He only moves back to Korea, where he was born, with the rest of his family when it’s time to do his residency.  
  
War has devastated the country. He has a lot of work to do, it seems. A lot of people to help.  
  
And through his long hours at the hospital, he’s introduced to a man that strikes him as someone very broken, in deep and unthinkable ways. An amputee by the name of Moon Byungho, who he’s meant to help out between his weekly veteran support group sessions, talk him through getting his life back on track.  
  
Byungho makes him kind of sad, if he’s honest. The mental image of a war veteran is someone old and greying, but Byungho is much younger than he is. Just a kid really.  
  
Byungho is… immensely complicated. He has so many issues that Jongin doesn’t want to offend him by probing into, but that he also really wants to help him deal with.  
  
It’s inevitable he falls in love, in the end.  
  
And then everything looks like it’s going to fall to pieces, because Jongin has the audacity to actually  _kiss_  Byungho, drunk and out of nowhere, and he ends up being shoved off.  
  
But Byungho puts all those pieces back together again, a while later. As it turns out, Byungho loves him just as much, and in the same way, even if he never expressly says it  _like that_.  
  
Jongin thinks they’ll get to be happy then, in secret. He thinks that getting to kiss Byungho whenever he wants _is_  happiness in and of itself, and that life can’t get much better than this, even if nobody else even knows he’s in love.  
  
But then there’s that one awful night. That night when one of Byungho’s veteran friends discovers them, and then follows Jongin home later.  
  
His life is cut short in a senseless act of violence then. He doesn’t remember much after Sungki found him, but he does remember pain.  
  
He remembers pain, and also: a little flash of Byungho’s face before he died. A little spark of transient happiness before he was sent off into the dark arms of death, only to start his next life.  
  
And that’s also exactly the night where their happiness ended, it seems.  
  
Because the next four lifetimes are nothing but hell.  
  
  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
  
  
In this life, Jongin remembers.  
  
In this life, he is Shin Joonho, and his parents look at him all funny whenever he talks about this war veteran he knew  _‘before’_. By the time he understands that all of that isn’t actually normal, the other kids at school have already branded him as ‘crazy’, and no one wants to be his friend.  
  
He has a lonely childhood.  
  
A lonely adolescence, too, seeing as even if there  _were_  people who wanted to talk to him, he’s never really learnt how to socialise properly, and he wouldn’t even know what to say.  
  
It’s only in university that anything remotely interesting happens in his life, really.  
  
With no social life to speak of, high school had been nothing but studying, and he’d ended up with grades good enough to land himself a spot at Yonsei. But even then, he’s a little bit listless, and it’s not his top-of-the-line courses that end up throwing him off course for the first time.  
  
One day, when he’s headed out to class, he sees a man walking out of the apartment complex across the street and a little ways up from him, who looks awfully familiar. It only takes a minute or two of surreptitious glances to realise he looks exactly like Byungho – the strange man he’s not supposed to remember from a past life that shouldn’t exist.  
  
He knows he shouldn’t, but he kind of follows Byungho – or whoever he is now – to class that day anyway. He takes the same train as him and everything, only making sure to sit a few seats down, and draw no attention to himself.  
  
Byungho studies at one of the lesser universities across the city from him. Byungho wears sweater vests and button downs and polished shoes, and is sort of extremely cute nowadays.  
  
Hey. Jongin can’t help it. He was  _in love_  with him before, was he not?  
  
And again, he knows he shouldn’t. But later, when he’s staring out through his third-story window at the other apartment building, in a way he can’t quite convince himself isn’t obsessive, he sees Byungho leaving to go somewhere. This time, he’s dressed in dark-wash jeans and leather. And it’s a little bit mouth-watering. So he follows him. Again.  
  
They end up in a bar on a side of town Jongin’s never been to, and if he’s honest, he doesn’t really like it. But then Byungho buys him a drink, and comes over to talk to him, and everything’s confusing, but, at the same time, he thinks everything might be okay.  
  
Byungho tells him his name is Youngjin. But that might be a lie because Byungho also told him he’s not a student, and Jongin’s sort-of-maybe already stalked him enough to know that’s not true.  
  
He also doesn’t remember Jongin.  
  
Which is disappointing, to say the least. But then Jongin kind of does a little double take – and yes, it really is Byungho right there in front of him. Byungho is  _real_ , and maybe he doesn’t need to be remembered, because the very existence of the person across the table from him makes him feel a whole lot less crazy.  
  
Byungho invites him out for a smoke next. Which is nice, but Jongin doesn’t smoke, and somehow, he ends up down on his knees and unable to resist his request that Jongin suck his dick.  
  
He  _was_  in love with him. He still is, probably.  
  
Besides, he thinks – hopes – maybe this will jog his memory. It doesn’t.  
  
Nor do his attempts to kiss Byungho. On the contrary – he’s shoved off and told not to get the wrong idea.  
  
And it’s that point that his mind decides to come crashing down around him.  
  
Byungho leaves, and a moment later, so does Jongin. Half an hour later, he’s at the top of his own apartment building, willing himself to take the plunge and jump.  
  
Byungho doesn’t remember him. Byungho looked at him like he was crazy. Byungho might not even be real, and, worst of all: Byungho does not love him.  
  
He jumps.  
  
Death by concrete does not prove to be particularly painful.  
  
  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
  
  
_In this life, Jongin does not remember._  
  
In this life, he is Nam Younghwan, but he’s better known by his stage name: Angel. Because, in this life, as a result of a deadbeat dad, and a mother who’s too busy to watch where he goes after school all the time, he ends up a stripper before he’s even legally old enough to work.  
  
Half of him is doing it because it’s fun. A daring thrill so at odds with his days spent doing schoolwork. And he does love dancing, too.   
  
The other half knows he kind of just really needs the money if he ever wants to do anything with the shitty hand life has been dealing him since day one.  
  
The joint where he works is the lowest of the low. The strip show is just a front for prostitution really, and so, when he was seventeen, he started sleeping with random men in suits, twice a week, who called him stuff like ‘sweetheart’ and other, more racially charged things, that he doesn’t like to talk about.  
  
Born and bred in New York City, he can’t even speak a lick of Korean either, so when he’s suddenly being eyed up by a Korean customer one night, he only hopes the man can speak to him in English. He’s negotiated with tourists before, and it doesn’t always end up pretty.  
  
(For the tourist, mind you.)  
  
Jongin is nineteen when this happens. The customer  _can_  speak English as it turns out – albeit with a heavy accent – but Jongin kind of wishes he’d never had to listen to a word he said, in the end.  
  
He was clearly drunk when Jongin lured him to the back rooms. It’s predatory – he knows – but those are the easiest customers to get cash out of, and money’s tight now that he’s finally been kicked out of his mother’s house.  
  
And then he’d started spouting these crazy things, about how he knew Jongin from somewhere. About how Jongin was in some war. He’d thought, at first, if he’d ignored it and got on with his life, it would all be fine.  
  
But then the man had grabbed at him, and Jongin had screamed. The bouncers had appeared to pull him off right before he threw up all over the floor, but the look in his eyes – determined, and so very, very honest – never quite left Jongin, for the rest of his life.  
  
Jongin’s had his fair share of delusional, clingy customers. But that one really left an impression, somehow.  
  
In this life, Jongin grows up and marries a woman he does not love. He has two children that he tries to be a better father to than his own, but eventually, the volatile atmosphere of home life with a wife he can no longer stand starts to get to him.  
  
He files for divorce a month after he leaves.  
  
Jongin dies before the divorce papers even get through all of their red tape.  _A tragic car accident_ , the coroner says.  _He must have lost control of the wheel to swerve in front of a truck like that_.  
  
But everyone who knows Jongin in this life thinks it might not have been so accidental.  
  
Not everyone has healthy coping mechanisms, after all.  
  
  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
  
  
_In this life, Jongin remembers._  
  
In this life, he is Lee Donghyun, and he leaves Korea for London because he thinks maybe, just maybe, leaving his home country will help him stop being haunted by images from past lives that he logically knows couldn’t have happened.  
  
It doesn’t really. He just takes them with him.  
  
Perhaps he just has a very active imagination, he thinks.  
  
But in this life, Jongin is a nurse, and he specialises in live-in help. When he gets the file for the first patient he will take on in his new home, his heart stops short.  
  
And suddenly, he doesn’t doubt his imagination anymore.  
  
Because the picture staring back at him is a face he remembers, one that he would recognise anywhere. It belongs to Byungho. His love. The light of his life that up until this very point in time, he thought was nothing more than a figment of his imagination.  
  
Looking through the patient file is depressing though. Byungho – or Hyunwoo, as he’s now known – is sick. Extremely sick. And he’s basically getting live-in help as a more comfortable way to spend his time at home while he waits to die.  
  
No one outright phrases it like that, but Jongin can read between the lines.  
  
But if he can help Byungho – Hyunwoo – in any way, he will. So he snaps up the job, and tries not to burst into tears with joy the first time he sees him.  
  
Besides. It’s a little sobering seeing your once-lover painted in a sickly shade of blue. Jongin knows now that this life is going to be one of the hardest.  
  
Seeing as he’s literally going to have to watch a man he’s in love with wither away and die, and all.  
  
He decides, ultimately, that it’s probably best not to tell him. He remembers now how ‘Youngjin’ (if that was ever really his name) treated him in their second life, and how he himself treated Byungho in the last. Trying to tell each other the truth seems to prove disastrous always, and besides, it would probably just distress Hyunwoo, and push him even closer to his deathbed.  
  
So he just… doesn’t  
  
Instead, he takes care of Hyunwoo. He cherishes him and the time they get to spend together, although it looks like it won’t be long. Because despite how hard he wishes and hopes and prays, the doctors only ever seem to give Hyunwoo bad news, and at this point he has about, at most, another year.  
  
But in the times in between, when Jongin is allowed, for a moment or two, to forget how sad all of this is, Hyunwoo is a writer, and he’s interesting to get to know and talk to. He has a book he’s working on, one that he cares about very much, and it’s that one time Hyunwoo asks him to publish it after he dies that finally cracks through all of his composure.  
  
Life is just so fucking unfair to the both of them. Why them? Why do  _they_  have to go through all of this shit?  
  
Jongin doesn’t know, but one second he’s in tears, and the next he’s kissing Hyunwoo like his life depends on it, and it’s so good that he almost forgets that Hyunwoo is fragile, that his body can’t handle much of this kind of thing.  
  
He remembers though, when Hyunwoo pushes him off, heaving forward, and he rushes to get his bucket before he can throw up all over his bedsheets.  
  
When he’s recovered, Hyunwoo tells him it’s a stupid idea. That he’s going to die, and there’s no reason to put himself through all of this pain.  
  
Jongin knows better though, and in the end he gets his way. Either way, this is going to hurt him, so what’s the harm in having a little, tiny piece of happiness for once in their damn lives?  
  
But they really don’t get much time after that. It’s as if the universe is plotting against them, and when they’ve finally sorted out their feelings somewhat, it’s decided that enough was enough, and all of the stars align just wrong for the not-so-happy couple.  
  
Hyunwoo dies a month later. Jongin does not cry at the funeral, because he already has plans to ‘deal’ with himself, and he’s spending his time wondering about how exactly they’re going to meet again in their next life, and whether, in that life, things will finally work themselves out just right.  
  
His only regret is that he can’t publish Hyunwoo’s book, since he left it unfinished. A bit of a bad omen, Jongin thinks, to be cut off before you can get to the happy ending part.  
  
It’s kind of fitting for the two of them though.  
  
But his whole fucking life is a bad omen, and Jongin kind of can’t cope anymore. It’s a good thing they’ve let him handle so much morphine around his next patient, because one, concentrated needle-full of the stuff has him drifting off to wherever it is he goes to get reincarnated. Jongin wouldn’t know.  
  
But it does turn out that drug overdose is the nicest way to die he’s experienced so far.  
  
Judging by his track record, he should start taking notes.  
  
  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
  
  
_In this life, Jongin is finally Jongin, and he does not remember._  
  
In this life, he has two older sisters, and parents that love and cherish him very much. He might be slightly spoiled as a child even, but it takes no toll on his personality, because he’s a sweet, kind of sensitive kid. He doesn’t really lose that part of his nature when he grows up either.  
  
And, when he’s still just a kid, and he wants to take ballet instead of taekwondo, his parents let him. They do worry, a little, that he might be bullied for liking something so traditionally girly, but make no move to stop him, seeing as it’s what he says will make him happy.  
  
And there are mean people every now and again. But Jongin is satisfied with his choices.  
  
So happy, in fact, that soon he finds that he wants something more, that he wants to dance on big stages and in front of screaming audiences too. He watches the complex choreographies and routines of the idols on TV, and decides that he’ll become a singer.  
  
SM Entertainment – the company for which he auditions – is large and acclaimed. But with so much natural talent and passion for what he does, it’s not really a surprise to anyone he knows that he ends up successful.  
  
During his trainee years, he meets a lot of new people. There’s Sehun, who goes to the same high school as him – a grade younger, even though they’re the same age. Junmyeon – who’s older than, and very mature. Taemin – at first just another dancer, and then a very close friend.  
  
Taemin debuts before he does, and Jongin is ecstatic and proud of him. He’s also excited that  _his_  time for fame will come soon enough.  
  
And it does. But not before he meets another character.   
  
Do Kyungsoo. Another trainee. A year older than him.  _‘Voice of an angel’_  a lot of the other guys say – and Jongin can sense their jealousy, because it’s that talent alone that will get Kyungsoo a spot on the soon-to-debut list, while they’ll still be working to impress the powers that be.  
  
Jongin is, quite honestly,  _scared_  of Kyungsoo. No matter how often he sees him around the SM buildings, Kyungsoo is always scowling. It makes him look like a mean person.  
  
But there are other people – mutual friends of theirs, like Chanyeol and Baekhyun – that say Kyungsoo is actually very nice once you get to know him. So Jongin manages to get it into his head that  _he’s_  the common denominator to every frown he’s ever seen on Kyungsoo’s face – and yes, he  _has_  seen him smile at Chanyeol once before – so the only logical conclusion is that –  
  
Kyungsoo must hate him.  
  
And then, of course, later, he feels really fucking stupid when he finds out that Kyungsoo is just a little blind, and then he also keeps forgetting his glasses at home, and, in all likelihood, Kyungsoo had probably never even noticed him in the first place.  
  
Well he notices him  _now_ , of course. Because now that they’ve been sorted into the same band, Jongin makes him the object of all of his affections – and Chanyeol and Baekhyun weren’t lying when they said he was nice. Because Kyungsoo puts up with all of his childishness, his whining and his pouting, and never tells him to fuck off, even when he really probably should.  
  
It’s with absolute horror that he realises, one night when Kyungsoo’s just absent-mindedly applying lip balm, and Jongin is equally as absent-mindedly wondering what it would taste like if he kissed it off those plush lips of his, that he might have a crush.  
  
But he just…  _can’t_.  
  
It’s not like he has anything  _against_  gay people, per say. But Jongin’s always intended to grow up and marry a nice girl, settle down, and have a few kids. It’s what he’s been taught is the right thing to do, and up until now, he’s never really questioned it, never really questioned whether he  _wants_  it. Its kind of just the only thing he knows.  
  
And besides. He’s  _seen_  the kind of netizen hate people spit at debuted idols. Being gay would be absolute suicide for their careers. Not just Jongin’s – but the rest of the members’ too most likely. And Jongin doesn’t think he can deal with the emotional toll of keeping himself safely in the closet for the next ten years.  
  
So he decides then that he’s not gay. He’s not. He just really fucking isn’t.  
  
He might overcompensate a little, if he’s honest. But then he’s really god damn terrified of what this all means – of what this undeniable attraction to someone he’s supposed to view as a brother means for him. For them. For his future.  
  
It’s only when he starts trying to put a little distance between him and Kyungsoo, that he realises just how un-platonically close they’ve gotten. They cuddle, for god’s sake. And Kyungsoo just accepts this?  
  
He has to crush that line of thinking soon after it starts, however, because a little spark of hope flickers briefly through his belly. The dangerous kind. The kind that sets him thinking that maybe, Kyungsoo might like him back, that this isn’t all unrequited.  
  
But no. Jongin is just Kyungsoo’s cute – and most favourite – dongsaeng. That’s all he will ever be, in his eyes, and Jongin has to stop being so delusional if he ever wants to grow the fuck up.  
  
It all goes well, for a while. He stops holding Kyungsoo’s hand in public. Stops leaning on him whenever he’s tired. Stops clinging to him like a koala when there isn’t really any excuse but the craving to just get a little closer.  
  
But then Kyungsoo starts avoiding him.  
  
And Jongin  _pines_.  
  
Kyungsoo isn’t smooth about it even if he thinks he is. He still hangs out with the other members, and Jongin starts to feel  _more_  than a little pissed off. Rightfully so, in his opinion, because they  _were_  friends, even if deep down, that’s not really what he wanted.  
  
And then it all peaks one day, when Jongin finds himself begging for Kyungsoo’s attention like the pathetic little kid he is. He puts on his best sad face, and it’s straight up emotional blackmail, and Kyungsoo ends up caving after very little pressure.  
  
Jongin feels fucking stupid when he’s petty enough to start an argument about it all. The last thing he wants is to bring all of his emotions up to the surface, to expose all of his feelings for the other man to see.  
  
But in the end, it’s not the argument that does that. It’s Kyungsoo.  
  
Kissing him.  
  
And it’s so good, and so hot, and Jongin is about ready to claw both of their clothes off. But he can’t. He just can’t  _do_  this. He’s too scared, and too much of a coward, and he inevitably bolts, and Kyungsoo probably hates him now.  
  
He has every right to, Jongin guesses, when he goes and asks Soojung on a date to ‘distract’ himself. A month later, they’re going steady, and Jongin feels like a right fool.  
  
He comes crawling back to Kyungsoo then, hoping the other will just kiss him like he did last time, and make him forget all the dumb stuff he’s done recently. Because now he’s so fucking miserable he doesn’t even care if he fucks everything up for everyone in this god damn band.  
  
But Kyungsoo doesn’t kiss him, or touch him, or do any of the things Jongin only thinks about wanting him to do when he’s alone and his guard is down. Kyungsoo just looks at him like he hates him now.  
  
He supposes he probably kind of does.  
  
And they’re in the middle of a huge argument, and Jongin just wants, more than anything, to turn back time. He wants to go back to when he  _thought_  Kyungsoo hated him, rather than stick around here in the now, when Kyungsoo actually  _does_.  
  
And  _then_  all he wants to do is run the fuck away, because Kyungsoo does the unspeakable.  
  
Kyungsoo tells Jongin he loves him. He tells him he’s  _in_  love with him.  
  
And Jongin might have this out-of-control kind of crush going on, but love is a different ball game. And suddenly this is scary, all of it a bigger mess than he thought it was going to be before, and –  
  
Kyungsoo’s in love with him.  
  
Jongin’s mean about it too. Tells Kyungsoo he’s wrong, that he doesn’t love him. Can’t possibly.  
  
Kyungsoo leaves, and Jongin is scared. More fucking terrified of this than anything he’s ever been afraid of in his god damn life. This isn’t like the monster under his bed he cried to his mother about when he was four years old, and couldn’t sleep. This is  _real_.  
  
And crushes fade.  
  
But Kyungsoo sounded awfully serious just then, and love is a little more permanent of a fixture.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t even look at him anymore.  
  
They’ve stopped speaking. Stopped interacting. They can hardly even exist in the same room together for an extended amount of time, and the tension between them is so palpable during work hours, that Junmyeon’s pulled him aside to ask if anything’s wrong.  
  
He lies to Junmyeon to get him off his back. It’s just convenient, and Jongin doesn’t have the energy for much else right now.  
  
Everything that was once between them is broken. Both of them are hurting. And Jongin wants it all to end.  
  
That’s why – the next time Minseok and Chanyeol take out the shot glasses for a special occasion – Jongin gets stupid drunk. It’s their official fourth year anniversary as a group tonight, though technically, they’ve all been together for much longer than that. Jongin  _would_  bring himself to be happy for the occasion, but the thought of another six years of dealing with him and Kyungsoo’s rocky as hell relationship before their contracts run out has him feeling a little nauseous.  
  
So he takes more shots than advisable. And, when he chances a glance up and across the room, to the corner where he’s not supposed to be looking, Kyungsoo’s doing the same damn thing.   
  
It should be amusing, in some strange, dark way. This coping mechanism of theirs.  
  
Jongin doesn’t really get the joke though.  
  
But maybe that’s just because he’s currently drunk enough to slur all of his words and make the hyungs laugh. Somewhere in between it all, his vision blurs, the third eye he always keeps on Kyungsoo despite himself closes, and he doesn’t notice as the other man sways his way into their bedroom – not that they’ve spent a night in the same room for god knows how many months – clutching at the wall.  
  
And, when he’s had enough of laughter that gives him a headache, he goes through that same door.  
  
Now the two of them are alone together, which is something new. Kyungsoo’s eyes go wide when Jongin walks in.   
  
“Jongin,” he says, sounding so, so unsure, as he stumbles, tripping over the corner of the nightstand. “I can – I can leave.”  
  
The alcohol makes him soft. Fuzzier around the edges. His lips are parted, moist, and these are the first words he’s spoken to Jongin in over a week that aren’t a mixture of dismissive, tired, and bitter.  
  
Jongin’s insides tie themselves up into little knots that don’t loosen when he swallows. Only tightening when he fumbles at the wall for purchase.  
  
He’s missed Kyungsoo, he realises. He’s missed being spoken to like he isn’t the dirt on the bottom of his shoe.  
  
Kyungsoo’s still his favourite person, when it really comes down to it. Has  _always_  been his favourite person, and, no matter how much the other ignores him, probably always will be.  
  
And that’s what hurts most. Being treated like scum by the person you might be sort of half in love with. Maybe a little more than half.   
  
Maybe a  _lot_  more than half.  
  
And Jongin’s been clinging to the word ‘crush’ like his life depends on it for too fucking long now, hasn’t he? But right now he’s drunk and he doesn’t know what he’s doing and everything hurts, and he doesn’t really know how much longer he can hold on to this stupid, fabricated reality of his.  
  
A sickening lurch that almost has him throwing up all over the carpet is what brings everything in his mind crashing down around him, only to go up in multi-coloured flames that raze the walls of his very sanity to ash. A massive whirlpool of denial and wanting and suppressed feelings, that threatens to swallow him whole.  
  
And the first thing the alcohol seems to have stolen from him tonight, is the ability to hold all of that back.  
  
Jongin  _wants_.  
  
“Hyung,” he says, moving closer. And he can only manage to vocalise his thoughts in breathy, one word sentences that leave him reeling and even more desperate, and: “Hyung. No. Stay.”  
  
By the time he’s managed to make his way over to Kyungsoo to grab for him, the other just looks… lost. So wide-eyed and uncertain, and the only reason he hasn’t bolted from the room is probably just because he’s drunk off his ass, and he doesn’t know what the  _hell’s_  going on.  
  
Neither does Jongin, really, when he plants his face into the juncture between Kyungsoo’s neck and his shoulder. Kyungsoo’s hands are immediately on him, clamping onto his upper arms in alarm, but he doesn’t push him off even when Jongin starts nuzzling into the warm skin where the collar of his T-shirt has pulled off to the side.  
  
He feels the front of one of his thighs bump into Kyungsoo’s hip, and then there’s a body, tense, against his own. Kyungsoo shudders, and Jongin feels it roll through him from where the bridge of his nose rests against his collarbone, feels Kyungsoo go completely rigid with so little space between them.  
  
“What are you doing Jongin?” Kyungsoo asks, but he doesn’t sound angry. Just a hell of a lot wary, and no one could really blame him for that, Jongin supposes.  
  
But he doesn’t really have an answer to that question, so he takes the tone of voice as a good sign.  
  
“Hyung,” he whines, his whole face scrunching up in an effort to close his eyes. He wants something he has no idea how to ask for, so he just nuzzles into Kyungsoo’s neck a little more ferociously, nips at the skin there and Kyungsoo jolts. “Hyung!”  
  
His voice is getting high and whiny now – just the way he hates how it sounds when he wants something he doesn’t think he’s going to get. It’s childish, and he’s sloppy and all over the place, but he’s drunk, and he thinks it’s a good idea to bring his hands up and rest them on Kyungsoo’s waist for the time being.  
  
“Jongin.” Kyungsoo says. His voice is thick with that kind of controlled calm that means Kyungsoo is anything but. “Stop.”  
  
“Don’t wanna,” Jongin moves his face from side to side, while still burrowed into Kyungsoo’s warmth in a feeble attempt at shaking his head. The room is so hot, all of a sudden, and he pants. His mouth feels slick. “Want you.”  
  
“Jongin I –”  
  
“I want you!” There’s a hysterical edge to it this time. Jongin is going out of control, and he kind of knows he needs to stop but –  
  
To hell with it all.  
  
“Jongin –”  
  
“Hyung –”  
  
There’s a sudden surge of movement as the walls go all out of focus, and then his back hits the mattress before he even realises he’s been spun around. Everything’s kind of hazy and dark when the mattress dips and Kyungsoo’s suddenly hovering over him, suddenly on top of him, hands skimming down his chest as his buttons come undone. There’s a mouth on his own and it’s with frantic hands that he reaches up to cling to him.  
  
He’s too drunk to feel and see and hear everything. To even register what’s really happening. It comes to him in little flickers of clarity in between bouts of his cloudy drunk stupor, and Jongin’s really just hanging on for the ride.  
  
In this moment, Kyungsoo is kissing him, and he’s kissing back. There’s a tongue in his mouth and a knee pushed between his trembling thighs, and Jongin’s skin has gone all jittery with the way Kyungsoo’s hands work their magic – one twisting into his hair and the other thumbing at one of his nipples, making him keen and whine.  
  
In the next, he’s unbearably hard, and somehow, his jeans are off, boxers pushed halfway down his thighs. Kyungsoo’s got a hand around his cock, jerking him off with clumsy movements, and the entire room and the comforter underneath and around his body are a furnace, burning him alive.  
  
He must make some kind of noise at this point, even though he himself doesn’t hear it. Because then the heel of Kyungsoo’s other hand clamps down over his mouth, bumping his teeth a little painfully. “You have to be quiet,” he hears, in between his own heaved breaths and suppressed whimpers, whispered hoarsely at his ear, a warm bulge rubbing against his thigh in a shaky kind of rhythm.  
  
His vision fades and his memory fails him then, and when it comes back he’s wriggling into the comforter as Kyungsoo works him open with slicked up fingers inside him. There are teeth scraping against the lower part of his stomach, and the head of his cock brushes Kyungsoo’s cheek, sending a tremor through his entire being.  
  
He’s out of breath and so turned on, and then time escapes him again. Kyungsoo’s raised on his hands and knees above him, spreading his legs open and sliding inside with a slick, painful little  _pop_. Jongin cries out, and without the hand to cover his mouth anymore, it’s probably too loud.  
  
But the music from the living room is loud too, and he vaguely registers some distantly boisterous laughter. It looks like Chanyeol’s still having a great time out there, and won’t be coming to bed anytime soon.  
  
So Jongin shuts his eyes and forgets about the others now. Kyungsoo’s bottoming out anyway, and he can’t help but moan, voice a little strangled with pain.  
  
He’s moving then, and it kind of hurts but it’s also too much – something he’s wanted for so, so long now. Too long. He’s clawing at the back of Kyungsoo’s shirt hard enough to draw blood in a moment, legs wrapping around him in a vice grip that has him faltering closer.  
  
Jongin is taken apart then, with soft kisses that turn into bites, gentle and clumsy movements that grow hard and rough when their desperation and need for release reaches fever pitch. He doesn’t have time to think about how much he’s going to regret this in the morning, because Kyungsoo’s stealing all of his rationality now with the way the bed rocks, and the tears on his cheeks leave little salt trails down his skin.  
  
He doesn’t know if he warns Kyungsoo when he comes. He doesn’t even know if he has the ability to speak anymore. All he knows is a building pressure, something so hot and so tight and so deep within his gut that it can’t be healthy to feel something this intense. And when it reaches breaking point, he explodes, biting and clinging and pawing into Kyungsoo like he wants to become one with him, like he wants to dissolve himself into the surface of his very skin  
  
And then comes the release, the inevitable slump and exhaustion and blackout. The last thing he registers before the darkness takes him away is a warm weight falling down on top of him, the vaguely disgusting feeling of Kyungsoo slipping out. And then there are arms wrapped around him, holding him as tight as he’s always wanted to be held.  
  
The last semblance of stability in his mind is trying its damnedest to be heard, trying to tell him this is wrong and sick and they shouldn’t be doing this.   
  
But there’s an overwhelming feeling of calm and safety, here, like this. Like he finally belongs somewhere.  
  
An overwhelming feeling of familiarity, too. But Jongin’s too far gone to think about why that’s strange.  
  
He passes out.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
_Pain._  
  
It’s the first thing Jongin thinks when he wakes up the next morning. The first thing he really registers.  
  
_Headache_ , his mind ventures, after a moment of lying there and wishing he were dead.  
  
_Hangover_ , he finally concludes, willing his eyes to open, so he can sit up and deal with what feels like having his skull sawed in half.  
  
The room is empty when he looks around. Chanyeol’s bed is still made and untouched, which means he probably passed out on the couch last night, and Kyungsoo’s is too.  
  
But that’s not exactly uncommon, these days.  
  
_Kyungsoo_ , is his next thought, and something niggles at his conscience. It’s still too early for him to work out what.  
  
But then he pushes the covers back and mentally prepares himself to stand up on his own two feet and – wait.  
  
Why is he naked?  
  
He stops. Passes a hand down over his abdomen, and stares at the white, flaky substance that’s dried on his skin.  
  
Because he knows what this is. He just doesn’t really know why –  
  
A flash and he’s back. It’s last night, and his legs are being held open so wide that the seam where they connect with his hips is starting to burn. There’s a dark hairline brushing just under his navel to press lips against his stomach, and then lower, and–  
  
Something clattering to the floor brings him back to the present. He’s standing up next to the bed now, and a few things have been knocked off of the nightstand.  
  
Oh  _god_. They didn’t really – did they?  
  
But then more little memories surface – memories of the way Kyungsoo pinned him down and kissed him like he’d been waiting for the opportunity for  _years_. Memories of being filled all slow and gentle, and then fucked rough and fast. Memories of the face Kyungsoo made when he came, the way he held onto Jongin like he was the most precious thing in the universe afterwards.  
  
Jongin sits down.  
  
He feels sicker than he ever has in his life.  
  
It’s not just the alcohol.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Minseok insists he drink some coffee to help with the hangover, but he throws it all up along with his breakfast before they’ve even left the dorm that morning. Junmyeon rubs his back, and gives him a wet cloth afterwards to help clean him up.  
  
Kyungsoo is nowhere to be seen. Their manager says it’s not a big deal, that he’ll just meet them at the airport a little bit later.  
  
The other members are sympathetic when they see how out of it he looks, if a little amused. They all just think it’s nothing more than a really bad hangover, and Jongdae gives him something for the motion sickness.  
  
It’s not a free day, despite how hungover they all are. There’s some awards show Jongin can’t remember the name of in China tonight, and they’re scheduled to perform.  
  
Jongin feels sick, sick, so very sick.  
  
They have a plane to catch.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
There are memories clouding around the edges of his mind, threatening to push themselves into his line of vision. Jongin doesn’t want to remember last night, doesn’t want any more reasons to be both hopelessly in love with and completely distraught over Kyungsoo.  
  
So he shuts his eyes as they do his makeup. Leans back in his chair and grips the armrests, trying his best to suppress it all.  
  
A sudden churn of stomach later and he’s excusing himself to the bathroom to go throw up again. He doesn’t know how long he lies there, with his cheek pressed against the cool porcelain of the toilet bowl, but it’s probably too long, because Junmyeon comes to find him and ask if he’s okay.  
  
And then of course, he’s  _“just fine”_  and in a flash he’s on his feet again. He unbolts the toilet stall and steps out, smiling weakly at the other man.  
  
As he’s washing his hands, an image of a place blinks into his mind. Somewhere with tall, dark buildings, and an apartment with paint chipping off of the walls. It’s not somewhere he’s ever been, but it’s startlingly vivid, and a moment later his mind fills in the gaps and tells him it’s New York during the 1970s.  
  
But Jongin doesn’t know what New York looked like in the 70s. He doesn’t think he’s ever even seen a picture of it on the internet, and there’s just no way his mind could know something like that with so much vivid self-assuredness.  
  
_‘You lived there’_  it tells him, moments later when he’s getting his hair styled.   
  
Jongin blinks at himself in the mirror. But no matter how many times he looks, he’s still Kim Jongin, a person who was born in 1994 and lives in Seoul. Not the flash of another face he sees, for just a split second, before it’s gone again.  
  
He shakes it off. His mind is fucking with him and it must be the after-effects of the alcohol.  
  
Junmyeon asks him one more time if he’s okay. If he’s sure he can perform.  
  
Jongin puts on his best reassuring smile, and tells him he’s fine.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s on stage, in the middle of their whole damn performance, that it finally happens.  
  
All one hundred years plus of all of his combined existences comes crashing through into this life.  
  
One moment, he’s mid hip-thrust, and the next, it’s 2003, and he’s in London.  
  
He’s in London and he’s in love. He’s in love with a dying man and that man is Hyunwoo, and Hyunwoo is  _Kyungsoo_  and –  
  
Back in the present, he misses a step in the choreography. The flashing lights are making his stomach turn even more than it was before, and Junmyeon’s shooting him a worried glance.  
  
He doesn’t know what the fuck that was.  
  
And then it’s New York again. Except he  _does_  live in that apartment with the chipped walls now, and he’s a stripper named Angel, and there’s a customer screaming crazy things in his face, and that customer is Kyungsoo.  
  
On stage, he staggers. Bumps into Sehun, who’s next to him, and throws the whole group off-kilter.  
  
Then he’s Joonho and he’s in love with a man who doesn’t remember him. Kyungsoo in this life looks at him like he’s crazy, and Joonho jumps off of a building the next morning because of it.  
  
“Jongin.” Someone’s calling his name now, and a lot of people are grabbing at his arms. But it sounds so distant, and he tries his best to push them all off. “Jongin!”  
  
And then –  
  
Then he’s a psychiatrist, and it’s the 50s just after the war, and his name is Jongyul, and Kyungsoo is an amputee, and they’re in love. They’re in love, and they kept it all a secret and then –  
  
And then he was murdered.  
  
In this life, Jongin wheels round, eyes wide as he searches for Kyungsoo amongst his group members. The stage is chaos and everyone’s shouting at him all at once, but he can’t listen to them right now because he has to find Kyungsoo.  
  
Because he remembers. Oh fucking shit, he remembers, and he needs to find Kyungsoo.  
  
And when he finds him, he can’t even speak. Because this is too much. This is so massive. And how did he even forget in the first place?  
  
Kyungsoo’s eyes are wide and worried when they finally meet his own.  
  
Seventy. Fucking. Years.  
  
Jongin takes a deep breath.  
  
And then everything goes dark.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
When he wakes, it’s to sterile white hospital light, and a drip in his arm.   
  
The nurses tell him that he collapsed on stage last night, but there’s nothing majorly wrong with him. A little dehydration, maybe, that the alcohol didn’t help with, and some prolonged exhaustion, but the only thing he can do is rest for a couple of days while they keep an eye on him, and get his vitals back up to normal.  
  
He’s impatient as hell though. Even considers busting out of the damn hospital to go find Kyungsoo right now and tell him that he knows everything.  
  
And it all makes sense, he guesses. How he fell so fast and so hard, and how he didn’t want to admit that he was in love because it didn’t really make sense as to why he should be, when they weren’t even actually  _together_  in this life.  
  
He’s been in love with Kyungsoo for much longer though.  _They’ve_  been in love for much longer.  
  
Seventy years, to be exact. Neither remembered for the whole time, but, between the two of them, they’ve been in love for over seventy years.  
  
And he doesn’t know just how much longer he can bear to wait before he tells him.  
  
Junmyeon is the only member that comes to visit him, though.  
  
“The hospital wouldn’t allow too many guests,” he explains, when he comes into the room with a bag of Jongin’s things – his phone, a change of clothes, some toiletries. “I told the other members not to come.”  
  
“Where’s Kyungsoo?” He asks, almost before Jongin’s finished. It’s more of a demand than a question, and Junmyeon frowns a little.  
  
“Back at the hotel, of course. I thought you guys weren’t on speaking terms at the moment.” Junmyeon’s expression turns thoughtful. “He’s been worried about you, though.”  
  
_Of course he has_ , Jongin thinks, and his stomach warms a little at the thought. He needs to save this whole thing though – he’s been behaving worse than ever in this life, and he might have already messed everything up. Hopefully, it’s not too late.  
  
“I want to see him,” Jongin says, voice turning hard and whiny and demanding. “Tell him to come.”  
  
“Okay, I’ll tell him to come see you tomorrow before –”  
  
“No.” Jongin’s already shaking his head. “I want to see him  _right_  now. Call him hyung.”  
  
Junmyeon frowns, and looks like he’s about to protest, because Jongin  _is_  being a little rude. But Jongin’s own face turns desperate, and he looks like he might be about to cry, so Junmyeon raises both hands in defeat.  
  
“Alright, alright, I’ll call him.” Junmyeon really  _does_  frown now, and all of a sudden, he looks really fucking done. “But,” – and here he holds one finger up in warning to show Jongin how serious he is – “Only on the condition that you sort your shit out now. I’m tired of whatever the hell’s going on between you guys.”  
  
And at that, Jongin can’t help but smile.  
  
It’s small. A little weak, just like the tiny spark of something happy growing in his stomach. A little grateful, too. But it’s a smile nonetheless.  
  
“Thanks hyung. I think we will.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Kyungsoo comes into his hospital room quietly, shutting the door with a soft click behind him. He looks a little sad, a little regretful, and he doesn’t say anything.  
  
And Jongin just spends a good long minute taking his presence in with brand new eyes. By the time the moment ends, Kyungsoo is looking up to meet his gaze timidly, a tad questioning.  
  
Outside the window, the sun is just starting to set. The city is polluted and hazy, and the rays of light entering through the blinds cast coral and orange stripes of light across the pale blue floor, the white of his hospital-issue blankets.  
  
This was how it all started, he realises. In a hospital. Byungho was beautiful then, and Kyungsoo is beautiful now.  
  
He looks into Kyungsoo’s eyes and sees so much there. There’s pain and so much suffering, but also love, and hopeless, blind adoration. He wonders if Kyungsoo sees that same look mirrored back at him now.  
  
“Hyung,” He finally speaks. There’s a tiny hint of blush warming the apples of his cheeks. “I remember.”

 

 


	7. part vii (final)

 

 

In this life, Kyungsoo is a little confused, and a lot scared when he hears Jongin wants to see him, wants him to come visit him in his hospital room.  
  
Because he’s really gone and fucked it all up, hasn’t he?  
  
How could he do that to someone he loves? How could he sleep with Jongin, when he knows it’s literally the last thing on the entire planet that he could have wanted to happen?  
  
Kyungsoo feels miserable. And he’s pretty sure Jongin’s just calling for him so he can tell him that it’s finally over, that this has to end, and one of them has to just go somewhere else.  
  
Maybe it’s not to late to start over, Kyungsoo thinks. Maybe it’s not too late to quit his job and get a new one.  
  
A new beginning with a different company. A different studio. A different set of colleagues.  
  
A different country too, perhaps. Just for good measure.  
  
He could run away from this. But even then, it’s all just going to find him again when he dies, and who is Kyungsoo trying to fool, really?  
  
He’d still do it though. For temporary relief, if nothing else. And if Jongin asks him to, he isn’t going to say no.  
  
He doesn’t know if he  _can_  say no to Jongin at this point. The fact that he slept with him just because Jongin begged him for it, drunk and uncaring of the repercussions, is a clear sign.  
  
But right now, Jongin wants to talk to him. And even though he’s gripped with a special kind of terror as he stands outside the hospital room – just procrastinating before he goes in – he isn’t going to back away. Jongin asked for him, and it’s time now to grow up, and look his own bad decisions in the face.  
  
Besides. He’s been worried sick about Jongin all night. With the way he runs himself ragged all the time, Kyungsoo’s not particularly  _surprised_  that he collapsed. But this time, he knows it’s got something to do with him, that there’s an emotional aspect to it all. Whatever the doctors end up saying, Kyungsoo knows that this was  _his_  fault.  
  
He takes a deep breath before he pushes open the door to the hospital room, walks in, and shuts the door behind him.  
  
Jongin’s on the bed, but Kyungsoo doesn’t look up just yet.  
  
Because Jongin definitely hates him now.  
  
And as brave as Kyungsoo’s trying to be, he’s not sure how well he can cope.  
  
Jongin takes a long time to say anything though. So long that Kyungsoo takes his chances, and looks up, and Jongin is so, so beautiful.  
  
Kyungsoo can’t determine the look in his eyes, but it’s not quite what he was expecting. They’re full, unreadable, and Jongin’s got a dusting of colour across his cheeks that makes Kyungsoo fall just that much deeper in love.  
  
“Hyung,” he says, and his voice is thick with something Kyungsoo doesn’t quite recognise yet. “I remember.”  
  
And for the first time in his life, Kyungsoo understands what people mean when they say  _‘time stood still’_ , because for one, tiny second, everything stops. Including Kyungsoo’s own heartbeat.  
  
Jongin could be talking about anything, really.  
  
But somehow, Kyungsoo just  _knows_.  
  
A feeling starts to bloom in his chest, a dull warmth that grows to spread its petals through the rest of his body. He feels his lips part on an exhale as it tingles up to his mouth, moves to his very fingertips, and lingers there.  
  
It’s only when he takes his first, tentative step towards Jongin, that he recognises it.   
  
Pure, unadulterated bliss.  
  
And that look in Jongin’s eyes is just so, so lovesick.  
  
Their fingers meet first, just touching, before they link together and their palms touch. It’s like meeting a long-lost lover for the first time in years – even though Kyungsoo and Jongin have technically been together for all this time – and nothing about it needs to be rushed.  
  
Kyungsoo leans down now to rest their foreheads together, watching as Jongin closes his eyes. Their noses brush at the sides, but they don’t kiss yet, just letting their breath cloud together, letting their first moment of reunion stretch and dwindle between them.  
  
Outside, there is the honking of cars, the noise of people getting on with their lives. But here, in this room, with this man, Kyungsoo finds he doesn’t need anything in the world except the tiny sliver of space in which they both exist at this moment.  
  
Something wet drips onto Kyungsoo’s finger, and Jongin lets out the most fragile of tiny sighs. Either of them could be crying. Or both. Kyungsoo doesn’t really care to check.  
  
“I thought you’d forgotten me forever,” he says now, voice quiet. No one needs to hear him except Jongin right now, and for the time being, he allows himself to forget that the rest of the world even exists.  
  
It’s just not important anymore.  
  
Because Jongin  _remembers_.  
  
“I remembered sometimes,” Jongin says, words delicate, gentle. “But only when you didn’t.”  
  
Kyungsoo puffs out a tiny laugh, lets it bubble from between his lips. Jongin opens his eyes and stares into Kyungsoo’s own in question.  
  
“That’s just so like us, somehow,” Kyungsoo smiles. It’s all so soft and tentative, and he doesn’t think that, in any of his lives, he’s experienced a moment so perfect, so light and tinkling with the way Jongin’s eyes sparkle back at him.  
  
It seems like the perfect timing to press forward the extra few centimetres and kiss Jongin now. And it is, because despite the fact that it’s one of the most innocent and chaste of kisses Kyungsoo’s ever indulged in – just the slightest little caress of one mouth on another – it has fireworks exploded on the backs of his eyelids. Jongin’s heartrate monitor starts beeping a tiny bit faster, and both of them laugh when they open their eyes.  
  
And Kyungsoo basks in the feeling that everything is going to be okay.  
  
Because he won’t delude himself into thinking everything is just magically going to be okay from here on out, but despite everything they’ve both been through, and despite how much they still have to talk about, Jongin remembers.  
  
And that’s the crux of it all, really.  
  
Because if Jongin remembers now, he can remember again. Kyungsoo doesn’t really know how, but he does know it’s possible.  
  
And it’s only a start. But for now, it’s enough.  
  
“I love you,” he tells Jongin. Can’t really stop himself, in fact, but it’s fine.  
  
Because –  
  
“I love you too,” Jongin murmurs.  
  
It doesn’t even matter that in this life, the nurse breaks apart their happy little moment a minute later with an emotionless  _“sir, visiting hours are over, you need to leave”_. It doesn’t even matter that they both know they’re going to have to keep it all a secret again, like they usually do.  
  
Because, in this life, Kyungsoo and Jongin finally get to be in love.  
  
Which means they are finally, finally happy.  
  
  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
  
  
_**Epilogue:**  
_

 

 __  
  
  
In this life, Kyungsoo’s name is Shiwoo, and he does not remember.  
  
He takes the short-cut down the lane today. Most of the time, he goes all the way around the other side of the block, since the track here is gravel and bumpy under his bicycle wheels, making him bounce in his seat, his teeth and jaw clacking together painfully.  
  
But it’s not a long journey, and soon, he arrives at his destination. The fence on which he leans his bicycle is creeper-covered, and practically dripping with brightly coloured flowers of every colour and shade. The cottage on the other side is equally as magical, looking like something right out of a children’s picture storybook.  
  
Kyungsoo makes short work of the rusty deadbolt keeping the gate shut, and closes it behind himself with a squeak. He makes his way around the back of the house with the air of someone who’s been there many a time before, and knows they will be perfectly welcome when they drop by unannounced.  
  
He can already hear the humming.  
  
A man comes into view now. Bathed in sunlight and surrounded by easels and canvasses that take up every inch of space in the little courtyard behind his house, he is the perfect picture of the brilliant but misunderstood artist – fully immersed in his work, and at one with nature.  
  
“Kyungsoo,” he says now, turning to smile upon the arrival of the other man. “You came.”  
  
He’s got paint smudged across his cheekbone, and his hands are a warzone of cerulean and chartreuse. Kyungsoo thinks he’s the most stunning of all the creatures anyway.  
  
“Why do you always insist on calling me that, Jongin?” Kyungsoo sighs like he always does, smiling despite himself when the other drops a kiss on the top of his head. “You know that’s not my name.”  
  
The artist steps back and smiles an enigmatic kind of smile.  
  
“I think it’s something you may have forgotten, my love.”  
  
Jongin’s got that distant look in his eyes again – the one he always gets when he goes all in his head. He usually gets a little cryptic during times like this, and Kyungsoo just nods and smiles, accepting that he might never fully and truly understand the other man.  
  
It’s an artist thing, he guesses.  
  
Jongin goes silent now, and Kyungsoo just lets himself be studied, feels the other’s eyes traverse every inch of his body. Jongin does this too sometimes – tells him Kyungsoo’s face is one that inspires him, even if that’s not something he thinks could possibly be true – so Kyungsoo lets him. Just breathes in fresh air and springtime, and bathes in the presence of someone he truly loves.  
  
It’s at times like this that it really feels good to be alive, Kyungsoo thinks.  
  
Jongin is gorgeous: sun-kissed and fluffy-haired and quite possibly toeing the edge of crazy, but Kyungsoo is deeply, deeply in love with him.  
  
Said man takes a breath now, and speaks.  
  
“I suspect you’ll remember in time.”

 

 


End file.
